Mariella

by Claire Frances Raciborska

  He loved too the sounds of the bicycle. He had slipped a playing card, the Queen of Hearts, into the spokes and it flick-flacked frenetically as the wheels spun. The rhythm reassured him and gave him a beat to steady his days.

  When he arrived at the station on the edge of town, the first thing he did was start to clean. He swept the broom gently around each petrol bowser, and across the floor of the small shop and office inside. He wiped each surface with a warm damp cloth. He took a stick he had wrapped with a collection of feathers and brushed the items in his shop. Lovingly he wiped a sponge in circles on the glass of the windows, stopping every now and again to blink through its clear invisibility. To Wellington cleaning was a way of caring; a way to notice and thank each object to be found around him. These things had all helped him in some way, or made his life easier. With every moment of notice, with every quiet breath, his music played a little louder.

  He saved the best for last, and that was to scatter yesterday’s bread across the newly-swept tarmac. He rubbed it to tiny pieces between his fingers before letting it fall. The birds always knew what was coming and they waited in the trees. Wellington stepped back from the feast of crumbs and the birds descended in a flock. He went down onto his haunches to watch. The birds paid him no mind. From his very first day, they had sensed no threat from him. He crouched silently, awed by the collection of bones and skin, of feathers arranged into wings, of tiny little skulls and agile little feet.

  There was one bird in particular that he had started to pick out. It was larger than the sparrows and wagtails. It was a lone Indian myna. Its glossy black feathers shone as it hopped among them, a king among hobbits. It cocked its head, the glittering beads looking at Wellington consideringly. It hopped closer to where the trail of bread ended just beyond Wellington’s shoe. Again it stopped. Wellington stretched out a slow hand. Inside was the last crust of bread, damp from inside his closed fist. His fingers curled out, and then he held still. The Indian myna pondered for only a second before jumping onto his thumb and grabbing the bread in his sharp yellow beak. He stretched out his wings and flew up to the top of the tree with his prize.

  After the birds had picked the ground clean and slowly dispersed, Wellington would pull up a chair to watch the grassy overgrown field across the road. He liked to watch the weeds move in the wind. Sometimes he tilted his head back and for a span of hours traced the curves of the branches above him. There was no one to get angry, there was no one to make upset. He closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of happiness.

  Chapter 14

  After Mr Nietzburger had left, Sophie had become very quiet. For that whole day, and the one after, she had said hardly a word. The soft curves of her body pulled harsh in her silence. The blue cloud that hovered over her always now glowed red. Anger fed her.

  Mariella accepted the silence. She read her mother’s colours, and watched, and waited.

  The next day, as Sophie and Mariella were sitting down to their midday meal, a rumbling sound carried once again through the quiet listening of trees.

  Sophie bristled with hostility. She put down the plates firmly and took her chair opposite Mariella. She did not turn to look through the window behind her.

  Mariella saw the shiny car of the Regulator pull into the clearing in front of the house. This time, no-one emerged from its streamlined doors. Through the windscreen, she saw that there were two people who sat inside. One she recognised as the Regulator who had so upset her mother. The other face was obscured by a flash of light where the sun played across the glass. But the colours of the unseen person were enormous. They bubbled through the windscreen and up through the roof. They shimmered purple and blue and a thousand different colours, never stilling long enough to become one or another.

  ‘Eat,’ said Sophie. Mariella bent her head obediently.

  As they progressed through their meal, Mariella could feel Sophie wilting. Her colours dropped and hung around her shoulders; the stiff lines of her body lapsed into weakness. Eventually, she lifted her head. She still had not turned to face the invaders waiting behind her.

  ‘Mariella, darling.’ Sophie started to reach out her hand and then changed her mind, bringing it to rest awkwardly between them. Then she turned her face towards the table. From here, her voice floated up like the last strains of a dying song.

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry. You’ll have to go to Placement.’

  The world moved past. It was a world Mariella had never seen. Gone was her green universe of animals and birds and leaves she knew to name. In its place was a world with hard edges. Mariella watched the angles and the lines, the obscurities of the city slide past. Here, the vibration of things was lower. Bricks did not shimmer like leaves did. They had a kind of movement of their own, the barest of tremblings. They remembered what they once were, before they were compressed and pressured into new moulds. But they had a larger brighter colour; a bolder movement that was not their own. It was something they had borrowed, sucked in from the crush of human lives lived through them, around them.

  The memories Mariella saw, as well as the clouds of colour of the people hurrying along the pavements almost overwhelmed her. She felt as she had the first time she had plunged her head beneath the rapids of her river.

  While Mariella swung between elation and drowning, Sophie felt herself being crushed lower and lower with every corner they turned deeper into her own world. She was so afraid. There was so much to lose herself in. She was afraid her gourmet core would be crowded out by the tastes and flavours of a thousand things she did not want but remembered only too well how much she had to have. She remembered how quickly wanting becomes a kind of being and the truth of things dims and fades.

  Chapter 15

  Sophie picked up a shirt and dropped it in her basket. ‘You should have some new clothes.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the ones I have?’ Mariella asked. She looked down at herself.

  ‘You can’t wear the clothes I made you, you need something that looks like what the others will wear.’

  Mariella frowned. She was not unhappy, merely puzzled. Sophie sighed. How could she let her daughter into this world when she knew nothing? Although she hated herself for it, Sophie remembered the world only too well. She remembered how to get by in it. To slip between the cracks you had to be unremarkable. Dress the same, speak the same. Work hard every day to mould your character to other than it was.

  While her mother sifted through piles of clothing, Mariella wandered up and down the aisles of the store. She found it a strange and fascinating place. There was just as much to notice here as there was in the bush. But here there was more on the surface, the well of meaning reaching a certain depth and then stopping, going no further.

  Mariella was intrigued by the thing most unfamiliar to her. Although she could not name it, illusion was all around her. It reminded her of the spots of the leopard melting into leaf-shadow, or the still gnarled form of the floating crocodile. The things around her were packaged with the same illusion, although this was more elaborate and harder to peel back. With words and pictures, colours and shapes, they made impossible promises, scolding reprimands and taunting insults.

  Behind her, Mariella heard a whispering voice.

  …should i buy that…no youre too fat…but it will make me feel better…no it wont…yes it will…fat fat fat…

  When Mariella turned around she saw a woman about her mother’s age, but thinner and taller. Her feet were pushed into a pointed shape, balancing on two thin spikes. Her clothes pulled her body just as tight. They were unlike anything Mariella had seen her mother make. Her hair framed her face in a neat way, impossibly still and well-behaved. She was staring at the rows of shiny things in front of her. Mariella could still hear the whispered voice, its tone becoming harsher and more urgent now, and while she did not doubt its source, she noticed the woman’s lips did not move.

  The woman did not notice Mariella standing directly behind her. Mariella noted with some interest how
the people in this place looked only with the two eyes upon their heads, and not very well with those.

  Mariella heard her mother approach down the aisle, and then turn once again, scuttling away from her and the other woman. Mariella turned around with a frown on her face. As her mother rounded the corner Mariella saw her colours pulsing blue. Mariella was puzzled. She had never known her mother to be so afraid. She was not the only one to notice Sophie’s quick flight.

  ‘Sophie, is that you?’

  The words that emitted from the neatly framed face were high and warbled, nothing like the harshness of the whispered voice.

  Sophie stopped her retreat. When she turned to face the two of them, she had a smile on her face but it was made of clenched teeth and strained muscles. Mariella, who had grown up with animals as playmates and who had therefore only ever bothered to read smiles in colours, wondered why her mother grimaced so.

  ‘Iris. Lovely to see you.’

  ‘Well, what a surprise! It’s been years, hasn’t it?’ The woman flopped her hands about as she spoke. ‘All this time I’ve been wondering how you are…now just the other day I thought, I wonder how Sophie’s doing? I heard you’d moved away, been transferred to another division…’ The woman called Iris eventually trailed off while Sophie kept her smile-grimace in place. Then she looked down at Mariella between them. ‘You were transferred weren’t you?’ she asked suspiciously. Her hand flew to her mouth in a dramatic gesture. ‘No! You never were let go?’

  Being let go was something that more often happened to those who trangressed upon the Rules, and unknown as they were it was considered very unacceptable to step beyond these lines. Well may Iris ask, her voice thick with suspicion, of Sophie’s long absence. It would never do to be contaminated by association. Even that could invite unwanted attention from the Regulators. Little did Iris know how far Sophie had really gone.

  ‘I would like to introduce you to my daughter, Mariella.’ Sophie stepped forward and placed her hand upon Mariella’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ said Iris. One always knew what to do with children. Everyone had them. ‘What a pretty dress you have on dear.’ Iris frowned as she noticed what Mariella really was wearing. ‘Um…unique isn’t it?’

  Mariella looked up at her. Although Iris was not a lot taller than the growing Mariella, she was wearing rather high, impractical shoes. Mariella’s eyes glittered like a bushbaby’s, and very unlike a little girl’s as she asked, ‘Why do you speak to yourself and us in two different voices? Very far inside I can see just one person, but your colours and shadows are so mixed up, I can’t get them to stay still. Are you really one, or two?’ She leant back a little, looking not at the woman but around her, above her head, to her left and to her right. ‘Maybe even more than two,’ she muttered.

  Iris spluttered, her cheeks reddening. What was this nonsense from an idiot child? And why did it make her feel so naked?

  She grappled for a hold of herself by throwing out a barb to another.

  ‘Sophie, so how is Stan? I haven’t had a chance to catch up with him since your wedding.’

  Sophie had been bolstered for a moment by Mariella’s shamelessness, and Iris’ hook bounced off her. ‘I left him. More than fourteen years ago. So can’t say I’ve had much of a chance to catch up with him either. Now you must excuse us, we’re a little late, Mariella’s going to Class today. You see she’s never been.’

  With her head held high, Sophie slipped her hand into Mariella’s warm one and walked towards the door.

  Mariella saw her mother’s true colours beat a little stronger. All the same, when they reached the jeep, Sophie said quietly, ‘You’ll have to learn how to behave differently here, Mariella. There’s Rules here.’

  Mariella smiled. ‘That’s alright. I like learning new things.’

  Two heads. Four eyes. Looking up.

  Two hearts. Pounding.

  Mariella and Sophie stood outside the squat walls of the Placement building. Three suitcases waited beside them. Although they could not know where Mariella was going to be Placed until she had taken the test, Sophie had equipped her with what she had insisted were the essentials. Inside the vehicle were another three suitcases – Sophie’s. She had decided to move back into town. She had not gone back to the house she had known, but had reserved a clean and modest room at a nearby hotel. The hotel was sleek and modern with all the latest amenities. Sophie’s roost was high above the city, a place of angles and hardness. She had not consciously chosen it as the antipathy of her home with Mariella in the trees. She merely favoured anonymity. She did not notice it was the kind of anonymity which pretends you matter more than you do.

  Sophie was shaking. Only a part of Mariella wondered at her mother’s fear, because most of her being was awed by the contemplation of this monstrous building. This heavy imprint in the world, built to outlast several human generations was so against all she had known. It was such a desperate grab for certainty, for stability, in a world of change. The building was a lie. She sighed. At least the building’s insistent ignorance of the truth was designed to comfort. That was something she supposed.

  Mr Nietzburger sat in the cool air of his office, sorting a pile of folders. He had several offices in several places, but his favourite was here in the Placement facility. He picked up a file and slotted it into the shelf marked, ‘Suspiciously Joyful’. He found home for another in ‘Indifferent to Society’. Then ‘Black Market Traders’. Names, personalities, skills, talents, histories. All could be quantified and characterised, providing one had an appropriate scale. It was comforting to Mr Nietzburger. It made him feel clean and calm. He disliked the dirtiness of confusion and questions and disorder. So much like nature. He grimaced vaguely as the memory of his unplanned detour of the previous month came upon him. That wild place. Full of empty spaces. And that woman…

  Then he thought of the girl but his mind slipped around the idea of her. Her being was of a substance so unlike the ravellings of Mr Nietzburger’s mind that he hardly noticed the form of her escaping his grasp. She trickled around his consciousness, escaping the oily clutches of his need to classify and categorise.

  But then there she was in front of him, his eyes portraying what his mind did not permit. A small queer-looking girl with a shock of unwieldy dark hair. She was nothing to him, really. A lump of clay waiting to be moulded into something useful. That was what he liked about Placement. The way it changed being into doing.

  Mariella was taken from her mother into the depths of the squat grey building. She was measured, weighed and quantified. And those who were doing the quantifying were becoming progressively alarmed. Numbers were dialled, buttons were pushed, people were summoned. Soon someone arrived who, instead of alarm, felt mounting excitement. His heart pumped faster and he found a need to wipe his palms on his white coat. He was a man of professionalism, of convention, but he was also an artist. And, he brushed his golden hair back from his forehead nervously as he thought, my masterpiece has arrived.

  Chapter 16

  The Anonym believed in the power of persuasion more than force. The use of force was messy and never embedded that well. Suggestion however, properly packaged, had proved immensely successful. They used those with keen vision, those who could see through to the spaces between the lines to mould and shape their suggestions. This was the vital role the Thought-Makers played. Mr Nietzburger was particularly good at bringing Seers to the Placement facility and having them properly allocated. It may have been because they were not what others were, and this made Mr Nietzburger’s desire to order things itch more.

  Another tactic employed to keep things the way they were was to remove that which pierced through surface layers, that which denied the illusion of one truth. Anything out of the mould had the power to do this. Especially music, art, stories. Things which spoke beyond the words the Anonym had woven around themselves.

  This then was the magic power of the Anonym – deception and illusion billowing out until
it obscured all but one reality. And those it controlled accepted one way to talk, think, act, look. With even Thought-Makers cowed from birth, conditioned to become a working part of a system that denied their very being, the power of the Anonym was immense. Strong enough to narrow a world of possibilities into a thin strip of existence.

  ‘The Activities, they’re supposed to humiliate. That leaves us open for our Trainers to shape our minds and change our colours. ’

  The others in the room shifted uncomfortably. The few animals in the room scurried to hide in the crevices of the couch cushions or in the necklines of their people’s clothing. They had all felt the red blush, the blossoming feeling of shame inside that Activities often engendered but no one had ever out loud called the feeling by its name.

  ‘But why would they want to change our colours? That’s what they’re teaching us to do to others.’ A boy without an animal, only a throbbing cloud of green sat up straighter and looked around at the others questioningly.

  ‘And why exactly do we think that’s a good idea? Why does it make us feel good?’ the first boy insisted. His snake slithered around his neck and lay across his shoulders. None of the others remembered ever seeing it so active before. ‘I remember when I first came here changing others’ colours was one of the worst things I’d ever felt.’

  ‘I…do remember that actually.’ The hesitant voice came from a frail blond girl who sat in the corner. A white dove was perched quietly on her knee, its wings folded and out of sight. ‘But after the Activities,’ she continued, ‘I was glad it was happening to someone else, not me. Even if I was the one doing it.’ Her pale luminescent colours pulsed a little brighter. It was a little known effect of honesty.