by Tim Lebbon
With a painful flash of clarity, I imagine my own body on that grotesque heap on the harbour; my pale skin splitting under the sun, gases belching to join the overall smell of the dying town, eyes food for birds and rats and street kids. Diseased or not, the dead are all alike.
I had decided to live. This girl might just help me.
“String cured you?”
Jade gently places the bottle on the stone surround of the lifeless fountain and pops the buttons on her shirt. She slips it from her shoulders and holds it in the crooks of her elbows, her gaze resting calmly on my shocked face.
I stare at her breasts. They are small, pert, the nipples still pink and raised from her recent cold wash. Her skin is pale, but the smoother area between her breasts is paler still, almost white. I feel a twinge in my own diseased chest, then stoop forward to look more closely. All sexual thoughts — teasing my stomach, warming my groin — vanish when I see the scars.
“Do you think I’m attractive?” Jade asks, and there is a note of abandonment in her voice which brings an instant lump to my throat.
“I ... yes, I do. But...” I point at her chest, realising the absurdity of the situation for the first time — an attractive woman, revealing her breasts to me on this hot afternoon, sweat already glistening on the small mounds. And my reaction, to point and gulp my disbelief like someone seeing a do-do for the first time in centuries. But maybe that’s what she wants.
“I wasn’t a few weeks ago.” Jade sighs, lifts her shirt back onto her shoulders and sits on the fountain wall. I see her mouth tense, her face harden, and she reaches for the bottle. But she cannot halt the tears. They are strange, these tears. They clean the grime from her face, but they seem dirty against her skin. Her mouth twists into an expression of rage, yet she seems to be laughing between sobs.
I step towards her and hesitantly hold out my hands. It’s a long time since I’ve held a woman, and I feel clumsy with the gesture. She waves me away and takes another swig of wine, spitting it into the dust when a further spasm of laughter-crying wracks her body.
It takes a few minutes for her to calm down, a time in which I feel more helpless than I have in years. She cries, laughs, drinks some more, but her initial rejection of my offer of comfort has hurt me. I feel foolish, being upset by this denial from a stranger. But I really wanted to help.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve had a rough few weeks.”
“You could have fooled me.” I say it quietly but it makes her giggle, and that makes me feel good. After a pause during which a group of old women shuffle through the courtyard, and Jade procures another bottle of wine, I ask the question. “Will you tell me?”
She waves at a fly, wine spilling down the front of her shirt like stale blood. Then she nods. “I’ve been going to help you since I saw you on the harbour. It’s obvious why you’re here. Do you have growths?”
I nod. “The Sickness.”
“I had it too.”
I nod again, glancing at her chest as if I can see the smooth scar through her shirt. “So I guessed.”
“And, yes, String cured me.” Her American accent has almost vanished. As if she is speaking for everyone.
“He’s genuine, then? I’d heard so many stories that I’d begun to think he was a myth. A hope for the new age.” I look down at my feet and cringe when a spasm of pain courses through me, as if the Sickness itself can sense a danger to its spread.
“There is no hope after the Ruin,” Jade says, though not bitterly. “Not for mankind. There’s personal hope, of course. There always will be as long as there’s one person alive on the planet. Human nature, animal instinct, survival of the species, no matter what the odds. That’s why String does what he does. But mankind was fucked the minute the Ruin set in.”
“The crop blight?”
She shakes her head. “Long before that, I reckon. How about the fall of Communism?”
“Why that far back?”
She shrugs. “Just my personal opinion.” She looks at the front of my shirt, a glint of concern marking her voice. “You need to see him soon, I think.”
I look down and see blood seeping through the material, spreading like ink dots on blotting paper. One of the growths has split and started spewing my life out into the heat, and I have the disturbing feeling that our talk of cures and hope has encouraged it. My personification of the Sickness makes it no easier to accept.
“How does he do it?” I ask. It’s the question I have been yearning a positive answer to since the Sickness first struck me.
I see something then, a shadow of an emotion pass across Jade’s face. It is only brief, as if a bird had passed across the sun and cast its silhouette down to earth. If I knew her better, I could perhaps discern what that look meant, decipher from her tone of voice what sudden thought had made her blush and twist her hands in her lap.
She tilts her head slightly towards me, and I think of Della. “I don’t know,” she says. I nod, reach for the wine. Maybe later I can ask her again.
“Will you take me to him?”
“Yes.” The answer is abrupt, definite.
“Thank you.” I smile and feel a warm glow as my cheer is reflected on her face.
“But first,” she says, jumping up, “we eat. Then, we drink some more wine. Then, we sleep.”
“Can’t we go now?”
She shakes her head, motioning for me to precede her into the building. She slams the door shut behind me and flicks on a light, revealing one large room with bed, fridge, curtained bathroom area and an old computer monitor with a picture of a goldfish glued across its redundant screen.
“Why?”
“It’s nearly dark, one.” She holds up a finger to count the point. “It’s about twenty miles up into the hills, two.” Another finger. “People are hungry, three. It’s got pretty bad here. Last month they ate two Frenchmen.”
I am unsure whether or not she is joking, but the implication of what she has said is so shocking that I can’t bring myself to question it. Instead, I sit on the edge of the bed as she goes about preparing some food. She does so in silence, only occasionally humming some vanished tune under her breath. I watch her moving about the room; lithe, confident, her body echoing her surface personality. Underneath, I am sure, there is still a lost person.
We eat. Old salad and a sausage shared between us, but I am ravenous and the food tastes gorgeous. I wonder where I am going to sleep.
v
In the dark, memory fails me.
For a whole minute I believe that the hand caressing my stomach belongs to Della. I cannot bring myself to talk. I fear that this will taint our friendship with jealousy and resentment, but I want it so much, have always wanted it. Della must know that. I cannot lie to her, and even lying by omission seems impossible.
I have never mentioned my love for her.
I know I should turn away, but it feels so good. Since the Sickness struck two years ago I have chosen to distance myself from sex with women, taking matters into my own hand. I acted before I was ever turned down, unable to bear the humiliation, preferring voluntary abstinence to enforced sexual solitude.
I sit up, turn away.
“Oh please,” a voice whispers, fighting through tears which I can just see as floating, glinting diamonds in the dark. “Oh please, don’t reject me. It’s been years, so many years. Feel!” A hand grasps my wrist and I remember then where I am, whom I am with. Jade forces my hand to her chest and drags my palm across the smooth scar tissue between her breasts. It is cool, like glass.
“Gone now, it’s all gone now.” I cannot ally the voice with the feisty, arrogant woman I have known for only several hours. Tears do not suit her. Her beseeching words make me blush in the dark.
“What about me?” Old fears shrink my penis in her hand, sending a flush of heat through my diseased chest. I twist the sheets beneath me, trying to hold back the tears. I feel something touch me, stroke the growths, and I cringe back.
“Okay, it’s okay,” Jade sooths. “Wait.” Her weights leaves the bed and then there is light. She is standing by the door, hand on the light cord, proud and beautiful in her nakedness. The pale white patch on her chest is almost attractive, set against the light tan she has picked up in the last few weeks. She catches my eye, then looks unselfconsciously down my body, eyes resting on my groin and causing a new stirring there.
“Nobody has loved me for years,” she says. She is crying again, but her voice is strong and I wonder whether they are really tears of anguish anymore. She comes back to the bed and sinks her head into my lap.
I close my eyes and think of Della. And my overwhelming emotion is a sense of relief that it is Jade here, and not her.
Jade is wild. Our lovemaking is fast and furious, passion-filled and almost violent in its intensity. By the end we are both crying. She remains sitting astride me, wiping tears from my cheeks, and I kiss her salty eyes and whisper that she is beautiful.
“How could you, when...?” I ask, half-pointing to my chest with unwilling fingers.
“You’ll be beautiful too, soon,” she says. Nobody has ever called me beautiful before. I like it.
In the morning we wake late. Passion seems to have fled with the dark, and although we smile and kiss it feels more as friends.
vi
“String is in the hills.” Jade is tightening the straps on her rucksack, checking the lid is screwed onto her water bottle, rubbing sun cream onto her bare legs and arms. She hands me the bottle and I smear my balding scalp with cream.
“How will we get there? Last night you said twenty miles. That’s a long way to walk, and I’m not so strong lately.”
“Maybe we can hitch a ride with a Lord Ship,” she smiles. “Come on.”
It is even hotter than the previous day, and before long sweat has pasted my shirt to my sickly body and soaked through to darken the material. I can feel the sun working on my arms and trying to find a way through the cream, and I guess that I’ll end up getting horribly burnt whatever measures I take to prevent it.
Jade has changed. She’s still the no-nonsense girl I had met the previous day, but she seems somehow more relaxed in my company. There is still an undefined tension, however, a distance that I cannot help but feel sad at.
After last night, I would have hoped for more.
* * *
PART TWO: THE TRAPPINGS OF THE FLESH
i
“Faith is as personal and as private as a thing can be,” Della once told me. “If you understand someone’s faith, you know their soul. But most people aren’t very comfortable with the idea of personal faith. Sometimes, it’s just too much effort, too challenging. They have to ascribe to some pre-ordained vision of things, where there are books and preachers and teachers to lead them through the minefield of knowledge. Prophesies tell them what they need to know, words written millennia ago by some holy-man drunk on monastery wine and eager to bury his cock in the young girl from the local village. Then they wonder why their faith lets them down so much, and causes so many wars and death and hatred. Simple reason — it’s not their faith. It’s a ready-made idea of faith. De-humanised. Just add belief.”
It was a hot summer’s day, only a couple of years before the Ruin really took hold and threw people back two hundred years into anarchy and poverty. Della sat in a garden chair, reaching over every now and then to snatch a sweet from the table next to her. I was lying on the lawn, mindful of insects and ants, feeling the sun cook my exposed scalp but not really caring. The sunburn would be a brand of the day, a reminder of what Della was telling me. She was a wise woman, and I knew nothing. I loved her.
“You have faith? “ she asked. The question surprised me, but I felt I recovered well.
“Of course.”
“Good.” She said no more. I was afraid that she would ask me where my faith was set. She’d know if I lied, she’d read me like a large-print book held under a magnifying glass. Because in truth, my faith was based solely in her. I wondered whether she really ever knew that.
“You may need it one day.”
She did not look at me. She stared into the eye-blue sky, a strange smile on her face. A smile I did not like. She carefully took another sweet from the table without looking at what she was doing. She could just as easily have snatched up a bug.
“Why?” I said, finally.
She glanced down at me, then nodded up at the sky as if the fluffy white clouds could explain everything. “Bad days coming.”
Fuck, was she right.
ii
Jade leads me through the warren of alleys and side streets until we emerge onto a main thoroughfare. The rucksack already feels heavy against my shoulders, pressing against my back and slipping my shirt back and forth across damp skin. The cream I had applied is already redundant, and I feel as though my skull is growing ready to split the skin from my head. There’s no real protection any more other than staying out of the sun altogether, and skin cancer is the least of my concerns.
The streets are surprisingly quiet, and the few people there are seem to be milling aimlessly rather than actually going places. I see several people who are obviously not Greek. None of them appear sane. They scrabble in the dust for dog-ends, fighting over a few flakes of rough tobacco. Growths have turned their bodies into grotesque parodies of people, walking warts that gibber and leak from various orifices, both natural and disease-given. I catch up with Jade and walk by her side, her presence giving me a comfortable sense of safety. She’s seen all this before, she knows what to expect; she can handle herself.
I wonder whether these people came to be cured.
“They’re all wasters,” Jade says in answer to my thoughts. The expression reminds me of the uniformed man who had helped me from the boat, the way he had spoken of the piled corpses. “Some of them were given the opportunity, apparently, but they wasted it. Now, they’re down to this. They even worship the Lord Ships.” She seemed to have slipped into her own personal conversation, excluding me even before I replied. “Strange how we regress so easily.”
“But they must know about the Lord Ships?” I say, confusion twisting my voice into a whine.
“Hmm?” Jade looks at me as if she’d forgotten I was there, and a brief pang of resentment stabs at my chest. She wasn’t like this last night, not when she was riding me, sweating her lust over me. “Oh, yeah, they know,” she says. “That’s what I mean. They know the Lord Ships are unmanned, automatons, pilots dead or gone. But they’ve been here for a while, and I suppose in their state the fears of the locals drive their certainties back out.”
We pass a group of young men and women who regard us with a mixture of anger and fear. I can understand what they have to be angry with — aliens in their country, invaders in a world shrinking back to almost tribal roots — but what do they fear?
“Why don’t the locals know about the Lord Ships?” I ask.
“Oh, they do. They just choose not to believe it.”
I can scarcely credit this myself. The fact that a civilised people can let themselves be controlled by ghosts from the past, willingly prostrating themselves at the feet of dead gods, knowing all the time that their actions are a sham. I ask Jade why this is so. I do not like the answer I receive.
“God is dead,” she says. “That’s what anyone here will tell you if you ask them. Do you know what these people have been through since the Ruin? Their population was halved by CJD-two; the Turks decided to nuke the north of the island for the hell of it; and at the end, when it all went totally fucking hay-wire, the Lord Ships condemned them as heathens and witches. Sentenced to death. It was only the fall of the Lord Ships that saved them.”
“And now they worship them all the more since they’re dead and gone?”
“As I said,” Jade confirmed through a sardonic smile, “God is dead. He let them be dragged through hell, now they hate Him for it.”
“Do you believe he’s still there?” I ask. I surprise myself with m
y frankness about a subject I feel so confused and cynical about. I have never believed in God. I have my own faith.
“I have my own faith,” Jade says quietly.
I think of Della, smile, wonder where she is now, what she’s doing. Sitting back and sharing her infinite wisdom with some other sucker, no doubt. A pang of jealousy tickles my insides, but I force it out and tell myself that Della would hate me for it.
“Here we are.” Jade has stopped in front of what was obviously once an affluent hotel. Now, it seems exclusively to house street-women between the ages of fifteen and fifty. A dozen of them are sitting in broken chairs on the cracked patio and they appraise me, laughing and jeering, as I step behind Jade. My face colours, but I secretly enjoy the attention. Last night has kick-started my libido.
Jade talks to the women in Greek and waves profuse thanks as she backs away from the hotel. I back away with her, wondering whether it’s a ritual of sorts or simple politeness, but the women are laughing again. A dog runs by and nearly trips me up. It’s a mangy mutt, but seems well fed. I remember the pile of corpses along the harbour and wonder what it’s been feeding on, and any sense of humour quickly flees. The women seem to sense this and stop laughing.
“Follow me,” Jade says, somewhat impatiently.
“Where?”
“Bikes.” She strides around the corner of the hotel.
In what used to be the swimming pool there are at least a hundred bicycles of all shapes and sizes, ranging from a rusty kiddie’s tricycle, to a three wheeled stainless steel monster that would have set me back a month’s salary in the days before the Ruin. I wonder what the owner would want for it now. The bikes fill the pool, a tatty metallic pond of tortured frames, tired tyres and accusing spokes. Dust has blown down from the depleted hillsides and formed drifts at the edges of the pool, like frozen waves trying to reclaim it. I see the remains of what I’m sure is a dead dog, buried beneath the network of wheels, handles and pedals. I try to imagine its panic as it realised that the strange, surreal landscape it had slunk into had effectively trapped it. It must have been cooked to death by the relentless sun.