by Liz Grzyb
Then I saw what he was pointing at.
Corky’s T-Animal Sales and Trade announced the laser cut sign. 5 Minute Financing While U Wait!
“Jack, that’s . . . ”
Jack didn’t stop to listen. He dragged us through the mud to a corral of transgenic animals in—if Jack were to ask my opinion and certainly wouldn’t—pretty poor condition.
Morose-looking goats and sheep wandered around the too-small yard, their hooves caked in their own poop. Some vaccine-starter chickens minus most of their feathers huddled in the dust. Stacks of mice cages held anxious, self-harming mice, and below each cage was a grubby laminated card advising what protein the animal was coded for. Corky himself was amorphous and lumpy in his striped shirt and shiny pants. He sat on a stool beside his mouse-cages, scrolling through an iPhone so old it should have been in a museum. A lone solar panel ran the fridge under the marquee, which although it said Coca-Cola, actually held agar plates and test-tubes, ampoules and vials of all kinds of genetic therapy viruses. Given the state of his livestock, I wasn’t too certain about the purity of his samples.
I made a low noise of disapproval. If Mr Mycelium had been operating on the edge of his demographic market appeal, Corky was way beyond the Venn diagram. A former government had set Eden Ridge aside by for intensive agriculture, mostly plant-derived plastic and biodiesel production. We didn’t have the technology or the capital to do anything with animal husbandry. Our soils lacked cobalt, caused vitamin B12 deficiencies in ruminants. We couldn’t afford supplements.
Except the Dunfries family had, once, but apart from Jack and his mother they were all dead.
“Maybe we could wait until the Sydney World Fair,” I said. “Everything here’s a bit . . . ”
“A bit what?”
I backed off. I was going to say a bit past its use-by, but Jack would not have appreciated me telling him what to do. I could sense he was mad enough at having me tag along, as if at fifteen years old he was still not man enough to be given free will.
“It doesn’t matter. She’s your cow, Jack. Do what you want.”
He was in a mood. It wasn’t my fault. Corky’s T-Sales and the stink of his harried animals had set off a memory in him. It was that night he was thinking of. The night when he first came to our door.
* * *
The part I remember the most, and this is in no way an actual recollection but perhaps a construction of memory blocks and bad-news stories and all the detritus that comes with twenty years in service on a hard-living agricultural commune, is of Mrs. Dunfries falling onto our front veranda in some kind of terrible crisis, her nine-year-old son having dragged her (half-bloodied himself) to safety across three kilometres of high-fructose sugargrass field.
Viv, she had called piteously, Viv, and later on my mother would wonder why Eliza Dunfries had even come to her, because the void that separated us and them was vaster than three kilometres of transgenic grass. It included things as impenetrable as money and class and the electric fence that was the real border to our properties, pretty blue gums and acacia hedges be damned. The Dunfries were a private farm, and very secretive.
Well, they had been all that, before the raid.
At Mrs. Dunfries’ cry, Mum ran to the door and took the stricken woman and her child into the kitchen.
What I thought was a growth on Eliza Dunfries’ cheek turned out to be her eyeball, resting on the shelf of skin below the empty socket and held by a length of optic nerve, as pale as a white length of twine.
This memory contains yelling and cursing. An image of my father, standing up, getting ready to head across the field in high dudgeon. I guess his first thought at having the woman show up was that it had been some kind of a domestic incident. The Dunfries were mysterious, after all.
“Minty,” he yelled at me. “Grab the twenty-two. We’re going out.”
Then there’s the memory of my mother and uncle dragging him down onto a kitchen chair and telling him to wait there Bob, wait you foolish old bugger and don’t you dare get Minty involved in this, else he would end up like the rest of the Dunfries clan, who we would find out the next day had been brave souls the lot of them, and who had died getting Eliza and Jack out through the raiders and the fire, and the poison that followed.
I was still curious though, and went to the double glazed window of the lodge, tilted aside the soft acetate curtains and looked out. Past the graves of my sisters and across the night-time fields, all I could make out was a wrinkle of light on the horizon, the medicinal acacia and blue gums on the Dunfries farm boundaries going up in smoke.
I’d picked up enough chatter from the farmhands over the years to speculate on what was happening. Husbands of Earth. An anti-environmental terrorist group. The last gasps of the old order. People who had for generations denied and cajoled and ignored had since dwindled down into small, random packs of hate.
This would be their last raid, but they intended to go out with a bang.
“Will they come here, Mum?”
Viv pulled me away from the window, shut the curtains. I could hear Uncle Julian as he moved quickly around the veranda outside the lodge, turning down the lamps. The dogs barked in their kennels as if it were the end of the world.
“Mum?”
“Shh.”
A propeller plane chattered overhead. Unfamiliar engine, probably legacy avgas fuel. The HOE terrorists made a point to only to use fossil fuels in their vehicles. Viv’s hands tightened on my torso and we listened to the plane pass our house, and crop-dust the Dunfries estate with a weaponised toxic powder bound up in resin.
Eliza Dunfries only moaned, and Dad gave her a wet cloth for her face. “Look down,” he was saying, “look down,” and Eliza’s moans became plaintive wails and the rest I couldn’t see because my Dad’s back was in the way, and the only light came from a single oil-burner on the table.
I became aware then of the boy beside me. He was big for his age, like all of the Dunfries kids, but the blood had turned his face the shiny dark of a snake’s belly.
“Is he killing my Mom?” he whispered. His eyes were wide. I wondered what his eyes had seen. Thirty people worked that farm. Four families, six of them from the city learning about farm production processes. Only these two had made it out.
“No, no, my Dad’s a medic,” I replied. “He was in the war and everything.”
Eliza had stopped her shrieking, and the voice that came out of her was creaky like an old gate. “Jack,” she pleaded. “Where’s Jack?”
He ran to her. The eye was back in, but the swelling had already started, and no matter how much she healed afterwards, I always thought of her face as it was in the kitchen, purpling with bruise, one eye almost shut. One face, looking at me, as if I’d done something to her that she could not forgive.
* * *
Everyone had heard of the Dunfries’ farm. A magnificent accident of geology had brought a wedge of volcanic rock to the surface across an ancient fault line. Thick, fertile soil they had, beautiful fecund acres of soil, as opposed to the shale and crackle of our own. A million years of metamorphosis, plus a naturally occurring artesian bore, gave the Dunfries the mineral wealth to run cattle and transgenic pigs, not sugargrass cultivar like everyone else.
After the Husbands of Earth raid, a few animals staggered out of the scorch. Most of them died from the toxin a few days after, but Fiddy had not.
I could see Corky’s eyes glitter as soon as he saw that cow. The brands marked her as a Dunfries special. The 50 branded on her shoulder denoted transgenic stock.
“You’re Jack Dunfries, aren’t you?” Corky said when we approached with the cow. “I was a sales representative when your estate got raided six years back.”
Had the man no empathy? I waited for Jack to get upset, but instead he brightened. “Yes, we were one of the last to be attacked by the Husbands of Earth. There’s none left no more.”
“You back working the land, I see?”
Jack’s hand tightened on the
halter. “Yes,’ he said. “I am working the land.”
“And the cow?”
“Trade,” he said. “Was hoping you could give me an offer on her. She survived the bastards. Good cow. We’ve been meaning to sell her.”
“Hmm. She’s a nice cow, but old.”
Jack sweated. Fiddy was old. Too old for his mother to keep when she could sell the cow and buy shares and a citizenship to Eden Ridge. If there hadn’t been a Husband attack, Fiddy and her eighty sisters would’ve been slaughtered within the year. Dairy cows peaked at six years. Cow units past then were not worth the upkeep, and the Dunfries had been all about the money.
“She has another good five years in her. Maybe a calf, maybe some embryos. She’d be good for tumour-marker antibodies. Human defensin protein expressed in the milk.”
“Get tobacco plants that’ll do the same now,” Corky said faux-apologetically. “Keeping animals is an intensive business, and around here the soil is shit. You need a license for animals. Supplements.”
I could see Jack fuming at Corky’s lack of interest. But the thing was, Fiddy produced hardly more than a litre of defensin-rich milk a day. Artificial insemination by a similar breed was the cost of a vertical algae farm plot. And Eliza, as an unproductive member of the community with no value or useful skills, needed the guaranteed income of a plot.
“But you can move her along to another buyer, surely? You must know heaps of buyers.”
“Not around here, lad. These are biosecure green belts from here to the coast. I barely break even myself. Most of my mice are only to test for contaminants or to amplify viral vectors. I couldn’t even move the spider goat.”
I wanted to tell Jack that we should give it up. If we took the cow to the Royal Show in Melbourne next spring, she might sell quicker. It was six months away. Fiddy might still have a calf. A half-breed would still express some defensins.
Telling a Dunfries that they couldn’t have their own way was like talking to a wall. And the longer Jack dithered, the more power Corky knew he had.
“Unless,” Corky said with all his seductions turned up, “I could pay you in cash.”
“Cash?”
“US Dollars.”
“Not Cali pesos?”
His voice lowered to hissing sibilants. “Dollars.”
The magic was old, darkly whispering. American dollars. That currency of a former age. Oil and Growth and Economic Ascendancy. Freedom and Independence. Greatness. The Dunfries would have whispered about America the same ways the ancients whispered about Ozymandias, forgetting that they were in Australia and the America they’d fled as children existed only as a memory.
“Yes,” Jack said, breathless. “Yes, dollars will be good.”
Corky fished out a brick of rag-paper dollars, a stack of hundreds as tall as two thumbs. He whiffled the rag-paper. Breathed in the scent of dirty notes.
I was beside myself with panic. Jack’s mother was one of those people who executed her rage in slow, silent ways. If I were with Jack when he showed up with nostalgic rubbish, she would hold me complicit. Easier to punish me than her child.
“Jack, this is not a good deal.”
“Shut up Minty. You gotta know your place.”
Chastened, I shut up. Corky took the cow. I watched her bony pelvis sway from side to side as she was led off. Could hear my Dad’s last words: Keep him out of trouble, Minty. We need Eliza.
Or Dad needed Eliza. I suspected Mum would be happy to see the back of her. Jack fingered his worthless dollars. “I am rich,” Jack said. “I could buy a farm.”
* * *
He couldn’t buy shit. The rest of that day we went from stall to stall, from the upmarket It’s U Singles! sgRNA tubes and mCherry Monoclonal Tracer Antibodies While U Wait! to bioelectric battery-hacks made from poop and an oil drum.
Jack waved the money brick around. At first he only thrust forth a few notes at a time, haughtily suggesting he was being generous with his American Dollars. By the end he was ready to give the whole thing away. His collar grew red each time an exhibitor in a crisp shirt looked at the brick of dollars and mentioned exchange rates and legacy currency. One of them even offered to buy me, and I don’t know what was more disgusting: the leer in the letchy founderpreneur’s face or the way Jack briefly, oh so briefly, considered it.
It took Jack the better part of the day to realise he’d been stiffed. We went back to Corky’s stall, only to find that he had packed up and gone.
“No, no NO,” Jack shouted, stomping about the tiny corral as if he could bring Corky and his menagerie back by interpretive dancing. “No!”
“Jack . . . ”
“My mum’s gonna kill me. Kill me!”
The sun was getting low in the sky by that time, and the fairground was approaching that stale end where the marquees come down and the electric disassembly drills make a hot-metal smell over the acetone, cat-piss and bananas of underfed fermentation vats. A sweaty north wind kicked up dust from a nearby dried-out dam, took leaflets and hundred-dollar bills with it.
I stayed silent, unless Jack turn his attention on me and consider that previous offer. He was a man and I was not, and in our power differential I could not refuse, and the less I reminded him of that, the better.
He grappled a couple of passers-by, demanded they tell him where the stall-holder had gone, and they shook free of the wild-eyed farm-kid with dismissive grunts.
If his intention had been to create a scene, it didn’t work. The roustabouts were too busy packing up. But eventually Jack’s crisis brought a visitor.
Bearded Mr Mycelium with the mushroom-sombrero. His parasitic mutualism with the Superior Switchgrass company had ended with the exhibitor’s marquee and battery getting packed away. The Kombi drove past us in a cloud of oily particulates, stopped, and reversed. Mr Mycelium leaned out the window.
“What ails ya, lad? You crying all like you’ve dropped your dacks and lollypops!”
“Fuck off.” Jack wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
“You made a deal with Corky then? I saw him loading that fifty-animal of yours into his truck early on. Said he’d made his mint and was moving on before the biosecurity inspectors come.”
“Do you know where he might have gone?” I asked hopefully, before Jack could tell Mr Mycelium to shut up.
Mr Mycelium grinned at me, looked me up and down appreciatively. “Well, for you, my lovely lady, I will hazard some guesses. There’s a transgenic animal fair up in Goulburn in a couple of days.” Mr Mycelium said. “Or Melbourne, the week after that. Bottom line is, she’s a whisper in the ol’ wind.”
“Fuck,” Jack said. “Fuck.” He kicked the dirt.
“Such are the trials of us itinerant para-scientists. When I cross over the border they always make me unpack my truck and be accountable for stuff. Not everything I own is on my manifest.”
“You think we give a shit?” Jack said. “I’m not here for a fucking conversation.”
Undeterred by Jack’s rudeness, Mr Mycelium went on. “Could use the rag-paper in those dollar bills of yours. They’ll hold a growth medium for mycospores, and nobody looks too closely at obsolete currency lest it infects them with nostalgia.”
“I’m not giving my dollars away.”
“Trade, lad. Got a couple of inoculated rhizomes,” he said. “Root tumours. Construction fungus from Pyongyang grey-labs. Stronger than concrete once it gets growing. Feed it corn husks and chaff and away you go. Good enough for a little side business for a lad wanting his own income. Get you a brick in a day, freestanding structure in a week.”
Jack stopped cursing and began thinking, which was always a bad sign. “Why do you want to get rid of them? They sound useful.”
Mr Mycelium shrugged. “Engineered spores have a time limit. Gonna expire soon, and I haven’t got room in my abode to grow them to fruit, reset the clock.” He waved at his already-stacked Kombi. “I hate to see things go to waste.”
Eliza Dunfries had wanted an al
gae cultivar with vertical growth scaffolding and sterile cloning facilities. But now that was not going to happen, not without real money, not without a cow that expressed human defensins as a down payment. Jack looked at the handful of woody tumours in the biohazard bag that Mr Mycelium had mysteriously produced. Things go to waste, hanging in the hot, abrasive air.
To waste a thing was a sin. Entire neurolinguistic pathways were set to not entertain the thought of waste. Jack was caught up even more than he was with the dollars.
“Sure,” he said, and passed over the ragged remains of the hundred-dollar brick with its repeating Benjamin Franklins, the socialist, scientist president who gave his discoveries away for free. I wonder how Mr Franklin would have felt being exchanged en-masse for some proprietary biotech? Jack collected the rhizomes and palped their spongy structures though the bag as if he could feel the valuable fungus growing there already.
Mr Mycelium winked at us, cajoled his van into moving again, exited the roadshow at a pace that exceeded the speed limit and incurred the wrath of the roustabouts.
Jack was happy now. “This is good,” he said to me. “Much better than a vertical garden. Mom will be pleased.”
* * *
There is a certain hot, loud drama in the way a Bowles, or a Merkel-Wu, or a Rogers, shows anger. There is a familiarity in Dad’s roaring, or Viv’s bark of approbation, or the volcanic cursing of Mrs. Wu when the aerator breaks down out by the cultivation sheds and she blames me for messing with the programming. This anger I could parse, its quickness, its half-life of a few seconds. Afterwards, chastened or cathartic, depending where you were on the exchange, the conversation could begin again.
But Dunfries, angry? The absence of anything? That was something else. Perhaps it was part of their culture and brand, that a Dunfries never showed displeasure the way a regular person might. That you’d never know, not until it was too late.
That evening Eliza Dunfries sat in her chair and made the same squishing, palping motion with her hands over the plastic bag, and not one word spilt from her mouth. Not even to ask how we’d come to be minus a transgenic cow and in possession of a couple of rotted bulbs in a pouch. One eye looked down at the foggy cellulose. Her other eye, the one that had come out in the raid and which my Dad had popped back in with a coffee spoon, roamed around its socket.