by P. S. Lurie
My mother chews on a fingernail, which is unlike her. They are normally trim and clean but I notice all of her nails are now devoid of any tips.
‘Dessert,’ my father says again, waking her out of her daydream.
She walks zombified into the kitchen and I follow her, having given up on my father who has conceded to the announcement rather than contest it but I am not surprised when he relinquished his fighting spirit years ago and adopted an apathetic stance for life, which has not been a secret but something we never discuss. I decide that shaking my mother or shouting will have little impact so instead I attempt to summon the fearless doctor she is at the hospital.
‘Remember the new oath,’ I say. ‘Who deserves to live. It should be Ronan. Are you listening to me?’
My mother pulls six plates from a cupboard and deliberates over serving the unappetising spongy concoction here or at the table. She reaches towards the cutlery drawer for a knife. The sharp blade reminds me of the murders across the garden and I jolt, not at the thought of dead people a short distance away but about the access we all have to potential weapons.
My mind plays a heartless trick on me and I worry about my mother’s next action; she’s acting out of sorts and I fear for my safety. I grab her hand with the knife in it and she automatically tugs her arm away as she looks at me with fearful eyes. Her expression implies that I was going to harm her and I wonder if paranoia is the chief instigator of danger amongst families in our neighbourhood.
I could apologise for upsetting her but after what I have seen I am the one trying to prevent harm to my family and am therefore insulted she thinks I could do something similar. After all, I am the one trying to make sense of this evening when everyone else has resigned themselves to death.
‘Did you hear me?’ I say more forcefully. ‘It should be Ronan.’
She speaks in a broken voice. ‘Who would look after him?’
She is right of course. Even in this world where we have had to grow up quickly, Ronan would be incapable of living self-sufficiently. He would struggle to look after himself physically let alone emotionally. In extreme circumstances he may be able to adapt and take on independence but we have no idea what will be waiting for us on the other side of the Fence; maybe not luxury per se and maybe not even safety, although it’s hard to imagine what the Upperlanders would have in store following this night.
Would Ronan be ok? There would be others to look after him but maybe that’s not enough. With my mother’s absence at the hospital and my father’s sluggishness, I have overcompensated by doing everything for him. He’d have to grow up fast but I’m not sure he’d have the resilience. But there will be plenty of children being Rehoused tomorrow morning. I can’t imagine parents choosing themselves to live so the Upperlanders must have taken this into consideration.
I catch my mother’s gaze. ‘Six year olds are allowed to be Rehoused. They must have thought it through.’ I hear the disquiet in my tone. They. As if their compassion has driven this night. And then I change my approach. ‘Everything about this is wrong.’
‘Yes. So very wrong,’ my mother says. With that she places her arms around me. She lowers her head into my shoulder and cries but I tense my back ashamed that I am still thinking about her holding the knife. ‘This is why your father says it needs to be you.’
I restrain from pulling away but hate myself all the same for checking that the knife is on the sideboard and hate myself even more that I feel relieved. But I know we’re not the same as the family who back onto our garden. My mother couldn’t hurt anyone. Could she?
When I was much younger, shortly after the Fence was erected and the fortifications began, my mother let me watch an operation after I begged and pleaded to see her in action. She asked a training nurse, Melissa, to pick me up from school and walk me to the hospital. Supplies were low and it was all the staff could do to sterilise the building and equipment so as to not cause more infections but they were working without electricity and healthcare was already compromised. With most of the Middlelands struggling, my mother was an important figurehead and I idolised her, with aspirations of following in her footsteps. No story of surgery was too gruesome. It was that, market work, teaching or fishing.
She met me at the entrance and explained that I was going to watch open heart surgery. I could sense the ambivalence in her voice that a seventy year old woman would take up a lot of resources, with no guarantee that she would recover. It was not the same world my mother had trained in, where anyone was deserving of treatment; now, doctors’ time and effort had to be stretched across the population and it made for difficult choices. Although I had been to the hospital plenty of times before and since, I had never seen her in action and my nervousness soared.
I stood in the room, a few feet back, as the routine surgery took place in front of me. I was in awe and not disturbed by the proceedings, until something went wrong. The medical vocabulary went over my head but the panic was glaring. I have no idea how much time passed whilst last-ditch attempts to save the patient were carried out but at some point my mother commanded the others to stop and she stood back as the woman on the table stopped breathing.
I waited for the end of my mother’s shift and we walked home together in silence. I guess she didn’t expect me to witness a death but she didn’t want to talk about it either. I bit my lip, unable to label the emotion I was feeling, but later that night I knew that I was angry when I started to act irritably. ‘Why did you let her die?’ I said confrontationally. ‘Why didn’t you try harder?’
I wanted my mother to reassure me that they had done everything they could but it wasn’t what I heard next.
‘Maybe we could have saved her but we’re low on blood reserves and there are more deserving people.’
‘Why wasn’t she as deserving?’
‘She had as much as we could afford to give her. I hate it as much as you, Theia, I really do. A long time ago my profession rested on a thing called the Hippocratic Oath. My job was to do everything to keep someone alive no matter what.’ She took a long pause as if she was still processing the change herself. ‘You are a smart girl. You can see that the world is no longer what it was. It’s not just each life that we have to consider but the greater good. Life is now about compromise. Sometimes there is nothing more honourable than sacrifice.’
My mother slides herself out of the embrace and walks across the kitchen to the sink.
‘See if there’s a bottle of wine in the cupboard,’ she says to me. ‘No point saving it for a special occasion.’
She’s right of course; tonight isn’t special but what other time will my family have to drink it? Alcohol is more precious than most commodities and hasn’t been produced for decades but every once in a while a bottle turns up at the market and causes a stir. The auction draws a crowd, even if the majority have no chance of affording the prize. I’m not surprised there’s wine here. Throughout her career my mother has politely declined some of the gifts patients and their families bestowed upon her but every once in a while some of them wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I peer into the mostly bare cupboards and feel a sense of duty to apologise to my mother for misunderstanding her. I also want to say that I admire how strenuous her career has been so I turn back but stop myself from blurting anything out when I catch her slide a black box from under the sink into her pocket. She closes the cupboard door and I spin back around in the hope she didn’t catch me staring.
I locate a maroon bottle layered in dust. I heard my mother stand up and brush down her trousers and only then do I pretend to find it.
‘Let’s take this all in,’ she says, sounding more composed.
My mother places the bowls on the table and asks me to dish out the dessert before excusing herself. If I wasn’t aware that she was smuggling something out of the room and didn’t want anyone to know about it I wouldn’t have noticed her strange behaviour but I glance at the bulge along her hip and then I panic that she�
�s going to do something detrimental to herself. I listen as she chooses to go upstairs rather than opt for the toilet on the ground floor and I am beyond suspicious. My family wait for me to serve them food so I plop the sponge into each bowl as fast I can and then excuse myself too.
By the time I have crept up the stairs and have my ear against the locked door all sorts of disturbing thoughts have crossed my mind. My mother has easy access to whatever medication is left in the Middlelands and she’ll know what a lethal dosage is. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to smuggle pills out of the hospital. My heartbeat pounds so heavily I worry it will give me away. I commit to listening for a moment longer before deciding what to do.
For a while there is silence and I consider banging on the door to stop her from hurting herself with the potent medication. Pills, solvent, poison. My mind scans through all the things that my mother could store under the sink. I remember that she keeps medicine to treat those in our neighbourhood out of hours. She’s told Ronan not to go near that cupboard so there must be medicine in there that could cause irreparable damage.
Then the silence is overtaken by static from inside the bathroom. The fuzziness is followed by a rasping voice and, although faded, the words become louder and clearer. Although my mother whispers it is clear that she is having a conversation with a man and it hits me that the object she pocketed isn’t medicine at all but one of the communication devices the staff uses to call one another’s attention at the hospital. I think they’re called walkie-talkies and one of the few rare pieces of tech that has a wind-up option but that our community also allows the low supply of batteries to be allocated to. I flashback on one time Melissa, by then a qualified nurse, showed me how they worked whilst I was waiting for my mother to finish her shift. I have no idea where the other walkie-talkie is but if it is at the hospital I had no idea that the signal could reach as far as our house.
‘Did you hear me? We had an extra announcement, directly to the hospital,’ the man says and I place his unmistakable voice immediately as the other doctor that is equally respected at the hospital. Adam Jefferson. My mother raves about his creativity during surgery. He’s a similar age to my parents but childless, more devoted to the hospital than my mother if that’s even possible, and always kind to me. Both my mother and I wait for his next sentence and I am aware of the way he employs dramatic pauses.
‘No patient will be Rehoused and only one staff member from each department will be allowed to live. No one can leave here until tomorrow morning.’
I hear my mother’s gasp. ‘Please survive this. I couldn’t bear to lose you.’
The static feeds in and I miss some of what he says but I’m too fixated on my mother’s words. I couldn’t bear to lose you.
‘There are only a few of us left. One nurse has shown no mercy. She shouted that she was blessed as she can be reunited with her husband on the other side of the Fence as he is home alone. I am so glad you aren’t here tonight.’
‘Just be safe,’ my mother says. There’s no two ways about it, it’s a nice way of saying ‘Kill everyone’.
I can’t believe what I have just heard or why my mother would be having this conversation with Dr Jefferson. And then I can’t believe my naivety. They are having an affair. Suddenly her actions make sense. No wonder she has been so upset about the hospital. No wonder she is always absent. I realise that she has ignored my cries of despair tonight, that she has wavered her allegiance to her family and disregarded our safety.
‘What about you Penny?’ he asks.
There is a pause and I remember my surprise that she was at home tonight and that I don’t know her at all. I am not sure I could stomach my mother signing our lives away to be with Dr Jefferson.
Her answer is not cryptic. ‘I will see you soon. I love you.’
‘I love you more,’ Dr Jefferson replies, and the static cuts out.
I hear my mother shuffle about in the bathroom and close a cabinet, probably to hide the walkie-talkie. I pull myself away and sneak back downstairs as silently as possible so that I am at my seat offering people a second serving when she reappears. She has no idea that I overheard her upstairs and she sits down but hardly touches her dessert.
So much in life should be clear cut. The oath to keep people alive no matter what for starters but I learnt years ago at the hospital that was no longer true. I think back to only a few years earlier at the coast and that my mother is not the only one with secrets. I justified lying then and my mother probably justifies it to herself now. At school we learnt that lying was wrong, cheating was wrong, stealing was wrong, and of course killing was never justified. But tonight we have been ordered to kill.
Again I tell myself that my mother couldn’t hurt anyone but I no longer know what to believe. I think of the family and possible countless others that are dead and I think of the hospital staff and the patients and how many lives have already been taken. But that is all outside the safety of my house. I watch my mother bite another fingernail and for the first time tonight I am genuinely worried that we are not immune.
Henry
I want to spend as much time as possible with my parents when I consider that it is time above anything else that has become invaluable and we are running out of it, even if it just to sit in silence or to read one of our favourite books together and find solace within its pages. With Selene’s impulsive attempt to leave we haven’t had the opportunity to discuss the announcement. It’s not something I’m looking forward to broaching. I can’t imagine my parents are thrilled either.
I strip off my vomit-stained shirt and drop it in the laundry basket but only out of habit; it doesn’t matter what I do with the top because whatever becomes of me I will never wear it again. I clean off the spit stains that hang on my chin and find another shirt. Selene, Theia and I have grown up together so I am not bothered about being topless in front of either of them. It’s different for them of course. I’ve sneaked the occasional glance. Selene has smaller breasts than Theia and doesn’t wear a bra most days. Anything we don’t have to have in our lives is a bonus and locating items of clothes that aren’t frayed takes effort so in this sense Selene has it easier.
The new shirt I put on reminds me of Theia’s twelfth birthday and how we celebrated down at the coast as we always did, unaware that it was becoming tradition. That year the water had reached two thirds of the way up the Lowerlands.
Plenty of books at school depict the old coast gravitating towards its rightful habitat, ebbing in and out around the same stretch of shore, but unexpectedly the sea pushed on and now pulls in debris, no longer sand but also gravel and concrete and collapsed buildings and anything else in its path. Fishing is a requisite but the shore is treacherous territory, one wrong footing and dry land gives in to the depths of the ocean without any warning.
The best situation for the fisherman is when the flood approaches fields as they make for easy access for the boats, although these opportunities for clear sailing disappear as quickly as they arrive so most of the time the coast is nothing but a series of inlets around houses. Beaches are a thing of the past and any reports that where sea meets land was once a holiday destination has now transformed to little more but a warpath of devastation.
We never made a big deal out of our annual excursion on Theia’s birthday, although the day she turned twelve was the last visit we made together.
The two of us would remember one another’s birthday when everyone else forgot; it’s hard to care about turning another year older when the reason becomes obsolete, meaning less about celebrating and more about surviving. As expected, I was the only one to remember her twelfth birthday that year. Thirteen was the big one, becoming a teenager was a sign that we weren’t yet done for although I’m not sure those made homeless and already living under the Fence shared our sentiments. Theia and I were desperate to be teenagers, dreaming of the day we could call ourselves thirteen, the first milestone of survival for the new age. To Theia, twelve felt equal
measures anti-climactic and exhilarating as there was the uncertainty we would see it but she could also begin to count down through months and days to her next birthday rather than whole years.
Theia’s parents were busy as usual, with her mother in the hospital and her father in his last few months taken up by fishing and trying to keep himself well. Her grandparents had long moved out and Theia opted out of school to look after Ronan and Leda. I could tell from her irritability when I congratulated her that she was upset she had been forgotten about even if she tried not to show it. Ronan was only three years old and Theia was already caring for him more than her mother was. She wanted to forget about the day and instead look after Ronan and possibly later go to the market to see what she could swap for some trinkets, which tellingly were birthday presents from previous years.
I suggested we take up our usual trip.
‘Why go there?’ she snapped back. ‘Who would look after Ronan? What’s the point?’ None of these questions demanded an answer and I didn’t risk it.
I told her to at least clean herself up before we headed to the market and that I would keep an eye on her brother in the meantime. Whilst she was washing in third-hand salty bathwater I took Ronan next door to the Ethers’ house. With no electricity to maintain the walk-in fridge Mr Ethers was retired and he and his wife were happy to look after Ronan for the day. They made for excellent caregivers and I never found out why they were childless.
But Theia was furious with me and it took some convincing for her to agree. It was a three hour walk downhill and we didn’t talk much on the way there, too busy making the calculations in our head. At this rate, we had a good three or four years before our neighbourhood was the newest coast.
A good three or four years. What a ridiculous notion.