“We’re going to a homeless shelter, Younger Sister, not another flat. We won’t have anywhere to put them. Not to mention we can’t exactly carry them halfway across town in just two shopping trolleys.”
“I know this is another adventure to you, Elder Sister, like running around masquerading as Brandon. But this is the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. Having to live in that place, with those people, coupled with the shame of Father getting thrown into prison? Not to mention that my reputation will be besmirched to the point that no man will ever want me to marry their son.”
I pointed at my stomach. “You call these bruises an adventure? I’m just trying to make it through each day without getting beaten up or killed, and you’re worried about your reputation? Open your eyes and look what’s going on around you! Now pack only what fits you now. And that comes from Mother, not me.” I spoke unkindly, and felt terrible for doing so, but we didn’t have time for this nonsense.
* * *
The supervisor arrived at midday and despite our very vocal protestations, told us to leave. We packed what we could into the shopping trolleys. Every scrap of food we had left, kitchen and toiletry necessities, our sewing kits, and bags of clothes for the four of us – I figured Brandon would join us sooner or later. I tried to pack some of Father’s clothes, but Mother wouldn’t let me. Pillows, sheets and doonas went on top, and then we were out.
I taped a message onto the front door, announcing where we were moving to, just in case Brandon came home and wondered where we’d gone.
“I can’t believe this is happening. How can they justify throwing three women out of their own home? How can they send someone like us to the homeless shelter? We’re not like those people. We’re not!” Karen said. She stood outside our door, looking wistfully at our home, and at all the things we had to leave behind.
“All part of the Founders’ vision for creating the perfect utopian society,” I mocked. “I mean seriously, what do we even need money for anyway? We live in a closed system!”
“Keep it down!” Mother snapped. “You want to be arrested for sedition?”
I scowled at her, but complied. Those sentiments were best left unsaid in a police state like this. I patted Karen on the arm in an empty attempt to encourage her. But the fact was, I was just as discouraged as she was. That was strange, in a sense. I had tried to run away from this very home only yesterday. However, that was with the understanding my family would still live there. Now we were homeless. Worse, we had to leave most of our possessions behind. It was so unfair!
My face burned with humiliation as we made the trip across town to the homeless shelter. I wore my beige dress and had put my hair up, which made me even more self-conscious. When I impersonated my brother, I felt insulated from the world and its disappointments and horrors, hidden behind a facade of deception. I could never recall having felt so exposed as I did then.
Chapter Sixteen
The homeless shelter was everything I feared and worse. Five stories tall, it used to be a hospital before they built a newer one. Once cream bricks were blackened by mould and decades of dirt. Windows were filthy, and paint hung off the front door in patches. Several residents, including teenagers and the elderly, lounged on worn benches that bordered the front lawn. Some watched us with predatory stares, while others seemed oblivious to the world, lost in their own misery.
“What do we do now?” I asked when we approached the door. Karen stood behind me, her eyes glazed over with shock. I don’t think she even heard me.
“There has to be a building supervisor. Stay here, I’ll see if I can find him,” Mother replied. She disappeared through the door, only to return five minutes later. She was pale, and her breathing laboured.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He said to go in and find ourselves a room.”
“Which room – did he give you a key?”
“That’s what I asked,” she replied as though speaking from a great distance. “He just laughed and said, ‘Key? What do you think this is, a hotel? Find an empty room and stake your claim on it.’”
“You can’t be serious.”
Mother just looked at me, too tired and discouraged to bother replying.
I laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, you’ll see.”
She pushed my hand away angrily. “Life isn’t a bed of roses and silver lined clouds, Daughter. You should have realised that by now.”
We pushed our trolleys up the wheelchair access ramp and entered the foyer. My nose was instantly assaulted by the stench of stale urine, mildew and rotten refuse. I was shocked to see garbage bags actually stacked haphazardly against the walls, some having split open to discharge their rotting contents. One ceiling light flickered incessantly, while the other was out, creating an eerie, unwelcoming ambience.
Several women and girls lounged on mismatched sofas and chairs that lined the furthest two walls, chatting with each other, staring into space, or watching the large TV that adorned the wall beside the door. A teenage girl wearing a faded brown dress with a tattered hem slouched in a threadbare chair next to the window across the foyer. She turned to appraise me with a spark of hope in her eyes, but I looked away quickly when I saw that the right side of her face was badly burnt, curling her upper lip into a permanent scowl.
Corridors led to the right, left, and straight ahead from the foyer. We tried the one on our left first. Navigating our trolleys turned out to be a challenge thanks to rubbish littering the floor. Several times, I had to stop and kick it aside so we could go on. The first three rooms we came to had padlocks fitted on the outside of the doors, clearly amateur jobs.
Hearing movement, I glanced behind and saw the girl from the foyer following us at a distance. Her face was half hidden in shadow, so I couldn’t discern her expression. I wondered what her game was. She made me feel uncomfortable, probably because she was so badly disfigured. I wished she’d leave us to our misery.
The door to the fourth room was partly ajar, so we pushed it open cautiously.
“Hey, who do you think you are? Get out!” An impoverished middle-aged man was crossing the room with the use of walker. His face was livid with rage, and spittle flew from his lips when he shouted.
We made a hasty retreat, but not before I got a glimpse inside the room. It was a scene of absolute squalor. A ragged mattress with soiled blankets lay against the window, waste paper, crushed beer cans, empty food wrappers, and an ocean of junk covered the floor.
I was shocked. How could the council turn a blind eye to people living in such conditions? Why didn’t they provide proper housing and assistance to people who couldn’t provide for themselves? How could they live in opulence in North End and not care that others lived like this.
We approached the last room in the corridor more cautiously, backing off when we heard the sounds of a man and women locked in furious argument.
Mother and I turned the trolleys around, but faltered when we realised our shadow was only a couple of paces away. The girl had a sickly demeanour – her skin was too pale, she had dark rings beneath her eyes, and she was malnourished as well.
“Can we help you?” I asked, none too kindly.
“A family moved out of a room on the fifth floor last night. I can take you there if you like.” She spoke gently, with a kindness that seemed in stark contrast to the horrors of this place.
Pangs of guilt struck me like waves crashing against a cliff when I realised how rude I’d been. “Ah, yes please, that would be kind of you.”
“This way, then.” She led us back to the foyer and elevator, walking with a slight limp. Her right hand was as badly burnt as her face. I wondered what happened to her.
By some miracle, the elevator worked, even though it apparently doubled as a latrine. I covered my nose with my sleeve in an attempt to smother the stench.
“You get used to it.” The girl smiled, which I found a tad disturbing due to her maimed mouth. I mentally shoo
k myself and focused on her person, rather than on her deformities.
“My name’s Chelsea,” I said, remembering my manners. “This is my mother, Abigail, and my sister, Karen.”
“Sofia.”
“Been here long?”
“Three years,” she replied.
“People do leave, right?” I asked.
“Depends. Some manage to get their lives back together. It’s rare though. And you need a man in the family to earn a wage. Do you...?” Her voice petered off.
“Ah, no. Just my brother, but he’s unreliable.” I said no more when Mother shook her head. She didn’t want anyone to know where father was.
“We don’t have one either,” Sofia said, downcast.
“We?”
“My mother and I.” She didn’t offer any more information, so I didn’t ask. Maybe her father was in prison too.
The elevator reached the fifth floor and Sofia lead us to a vacant room at the end of the corridor. The door was wide open so Mother went straight in, only to come out just as quickly, holding her nose and retching.
“This is the only vacant room?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so. I saw the family move out this morning.”
Seeing no point in delaying the inevitable, I held my sleeve to my nose and stepped cautiously into the room.
It was a bit bigger than I expected, with windows on the left. However, whoever lived here previously had been absolute pigs! The room was a rubbish dump, and reeked like one too. There was no furniture to speak of, just three stained, rotten mattresses, and the floor was literally knee deep in rubbish, including milk cartons, yoghurt containers, beer bottles, food wrappers, mouldy bread, rock-hard discarded pizza, and worst of all, hundreds of disposable diapers. The smell of excrement, urine, and ammonia, was overpowering. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, cockroaches infested the refuse and scuttled across the floor and up and down the walls. A violent shudder passed through me. I couldn’t abide the vile critters.
I staggered out of the room and fought to keep down my breakfast. “How can people live like that?” I gasped.
“They lose hope,” Sofia replied.
“But they had a baby!” I couldn’t imagine anyone subjecting their infant to such unsanitary conditions.
Sofia shrugged helplessly. Hearing a familiar voice sobbing in the background, I turned to find Karen slumped against the wall with her head on her knees. I squatted next to her and patted her head. I wished my mother and sister could masquerade as foragers so that we could all escape the town together.
“We can’t live in there,” Mother said. She was leaning against a wall, her face paler than I’d ever seen it.
“It’ll be fine once you’ve cleaned it up,” Sofia said.
“Is there somewhere we can get gloves, plastic bags and cleaning supplies?” I asked, turning my mind to how we could redeem this situation.
“In the janitor’s room downstairs. Come on, I’ll show you.”
My mother grabbed my wrist. “We can’t live in there, Daughter – it’s not possible.”
I took her hand in mind. “We can make this work, Mother, you’ll see. I’ll pop downstairs and get some cleaning supplies.”
She drew in a deep breath, lifted her head, and gave me the barest of nods. As a woman who always prided herself in having a clean and spotless house, this was hitting her harder than my sister.
Sofia took me to the janitor‘s room on the first floor and we loaded up on disposable gloves, facemasks, lots of thick black garbage bags, and hospital grade disinfectant.
“Will the janitor mind if we take this stuff?” I asked, wondering what I’d say if he walked in and saw us taking all these things.
“What janitor?” Sofia replied as she grabbed a bucket and two mops.
“Oh.” There wasn’t one. Why wasn’t I surprised?
We headed back upstairs. “Hey, thanks for helping us out,” I said.
“That’s alright. Not like I have anything else to do.” She gave me another smile, her brown eyes sparkling. How she managed to remain so vibrant after three years in this place was a mystery to me. It was a testament to the depth of her character. If I could only be more like her.
“So, you’ve been here three years?” I asked as we rode the mobile-latrine back to the fifth level.
“Yeah, since I got out of hospital.”
“Due to your injuries?” I asked, indicating her burns with a flick of my head.
“Yes. A fire broke out in our flat, in the girl’s room. Faulty wiring in the wall heater, they said. Mother and I suffered severe burns, and Father...” She took a deep breath before continuing. “He got the two of us out, but went back in one more time to try and put out the fire. He died from smoke inhalation.”
I laid a hand on her forearm. “I’m so sorry.”
She patted my hand and smiled sadly. “That’s okay. I’ve come to terms with it now.” All the same, a tear rolled down her left cheek.
“How’s your mother now?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t prying too much.
“She’s pretty much an invalid. Never leaves our room.”
“So you look after her?”
“Mostly. A nurse pops in once a week too.”
“You’d think they’d give her better accommodation than this hole.”
“They gave her the option of moving into an aged care facility, but she turned them down so she can stay with me.”
“Sounds like an amazing woman.” Selflessness ran deep in their family. I was jealous.
Sofia said she’d help us clean up when we got back to the fifth floor. I refused of course, but she fobbed me off with a laugh. Then came one of the worst experiences of my life. With Mother’s help – Karen wouldn’t budge from her spot in the corridor – we took eleven trolley loads of refuse to the large blue metal hopper in the yard. The mattresses, although light, were too large and unwieldy for one person to carry, so that was another three trips. After that, we scrubbed the place down with disinfectant – ceiling, walls, and floor.
This marathon effort took several hours, but the end result was relatively encouraging. The room was still in a bad way, of course, with linoleum tiles peeling off the floor, dented and scraped walls stained black in places, but it was clean.
Using hooks I found outside in the garbage, and a chair I dragged in from the corridor, I hung some bed sheets from the curtain rails to divide the room into three smaller living spaces. One as a bedroom for Brandon, one for us three women, and the larger one near the door to serve as the lounge-room. Not that we had any furniture to put in it.
It turned out we shared a bathroom with the residents in the adjacent room. It had a shower, vanity and toilet, and was nowhere near as filthy. All the same, we still gave it a scrub down with disinfectant.
When we were finished, Sofia took us to the supervisor. He opened the storeroom and gave us four ‘clean’ mattresses. In reality, they were tattered and stained, but were infinitely better than the soiled ones we threw out. He even gave us a hand taking them upstairs.
Sofia also told us the good news that the shelter provided meals for the tenants. At seven every morning the cafeteria on the first floor served bread that had been discarded by the bakeries the evening before, as well as gruel, which was basically a weak porridge. Lunch was more bread and fruit considered unfit for sale in the market stalls. Dinner was normally bread and yoghurt, and occasionally pizza.
“Oh, one thing I should mention,” Sofia said when she bade us goodbye after dinnertime. We were sitting on the floor with our backs to the wall in our brand new lounge-room. “Don’t go barefoot in the shower. You’ll get athlete’s foot.”
“What’s that?” Karen asked.
“It’s a skin disease that makes your feet itch like mad. Very contagious and takes ages to get rid of.”
“Ew – I’m never bathing again,” Karen wailed.
“Just wear thongs when you’re in there. You can pick them up cheap at the market,” So
fia said.
“Need money for that,” Karen grumbled.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“We don’t need your sympathy!” Mother snapped.
“There’s no need to be rude, Mother!” I said.
“You’re right. Sorry, Sofia. It’s been one of those days.” An apology from my mother – that had to be a first.
“That’s okay,” Sofia replied.
Chapter Seventeen
I barely got a wink of sleep that night. Not only was the mattress uncomfortable because I could feel every spring, but it also had a most unpleasant odour. I hoped it would fade with time. I was so glad we brought our own sheets and doonas. Karen sobbed until she fell asleep, which didn’t help. Mother ignored her, turning her back to us. I tried to comfort Karen by running my hand through her hair, but she just pushed me away.
Sofia turned up before seven and took us to the cafeteria. We lined up for bowls of gruel and bread, and sat at a plastic table that was bent in the middle and rocked on uneven legs.
The watery gruel tasted every bit as disgusting as I feared, but I still ate it.
“What is this slop?” Karen said. She pushed her bowl away.
“Boiled oats,” Sofia said.
“Well, it’s revolting! There’s more water than oats.”
“Goes further that way.”
Karen tried a bread roll and pulled another face. “This is so stale it’s like chewing on cardboard.”
“Some of the residents buy their own food. When they have money, that is,” Sofia said. She’d already downed a bowl of gruel and two bread rolls. I noticed her looking at my sister’s gruel. Mother hadn’t touched hers either.
“You gonna eat that, Mother?” I asked.
She shook her head, so I pushed her bowl to Sofia, and it was quickly consumed. I realised that with her mother an invalid and her father passed away, Sofia had no source of income. No wonder she was malnourished. There was something fundamentally wrong with the way the town treated those down on their luck.
Impersonator (Forager Impersonator - A Post Apocalyptic Trilogy Book 1) Page 11