Vagrancy

by Stacey Mac

  Bodies begin to move around me. There is some unseeable force that compels the dorm to awaken, and they do it all at once. One minute it is just me and my dust motes, socialising alone, and the next the dorm is in flux, moving to and from lockers to collect items and stow them away, to return the compound’s uniforms, and to change into our going-home clothes.

  With something that is neither dread nor relief, I rise with the rest. I shower in the girls’ bathroom, I change with my back turned to the others, I smile weakly at Mia and Delilah, who are fluffing their hair and chatting excitedly. With the intention of stowing away the many treasures from my locker, I return to my dormitory. The second my locker door opens, I begin throwing my miniscule assortment of personal items into a bag. Nothing really, just socks and twine and the only other jacket I brought from home. I reach high above my head for my mother’s safe keeping box, still lying underneath the crumpled shirt. I sigh as I lift it out. It’s empty except for my playing cards. The snacks that were hidden inside it were halved with Tilly. They’re gone now – Tilly and the snacks. That hole in my stomach aches viciously, and I wonder to myself if this is what true grief is – hurting over inanimate objects. Or perhaps the hurt is in allowing ghosts to animate them.

  The assembly will look the same today, except for the absence of uniforms and unity. And except for the initiation ceremony, which will now include a total of 513 kids ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen. This all leads one to believe that the ceremony will be a great deal longer than usual as well. I’m just that lucky.

  “My lady,” Vincent says, coming to bow beside me at my cot. Mia stands stoically behind him. “On this last day, I want you to know that I consider you my number two woman, formerly number one, and that though your hands feel like that of a ten-foot caveman, it would be my honour to take it in mine, and accompany you on our last journey to the Arena.”

  I blink. “A ten-foot caveman?”

  Vincent nods. “With questionable hygiene.”

  “Well, that’s just impolite.”

  “It is, but hygiene aside, here I am on platonic knee, willing to put aside my complete indifference to your femininity for the sake of good old friendship, so get the fuck up.”

  I glance discreetly at Mia, who seems satisfied, and then I nod. “To be honest, I’m just surprised you know so many words. Let’s go.” I take his hand, he gives the compulsory shudder at my touch, which makes Mia laugh. Vincent puts his arm around Mia’s waist, and we leave the dormitory for the last time.

  *

  We stand in order of age and rank in the Arena. The seniors will be formally initiated into Galore first. The whole thing always looks kind of unimpressive when you’re wearing your mother’s old jeans and a raincoat, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  I salute with actual, non-sarcastic pride when my friends are initiated before me. Not because they are now part of, as Snare puts it: ‘a great and eternal kingdom of warriors’, because frankly, that sounds like bullshit. No, I’m proud of them because they made it: they made it through all these years of brutality and conditioning and testing, and they did it with more grace than me.

  And I wish I could stop thinking and just be happy for them, but behind the pride comes the image of their names in a barrel to be drawn. Instead I calculate the ones who will have the most chance of outliving the rest, once this militia throws us all into a war we didn’t start.

  “G00163”

  I turn to Trey, who reads my UIC from a long list, and I begin my final march. I step past the seniors already initiated. Vincent winks as I cross his spot in the line. I march finally beyond them to the podium and I take to the make-shift stage. I read the oath of Galore in which the words ‘Endure, Accept, Obey’ are written no fewer than four times. I cut my thumb and add a small drop of my blood to a bowl. The drop ripples into the thick pool at the bottom.

  I think: how many drops of blood will fill this bowl?

  I think: is this the same bowl they always use? Or did they get a bigger bowl to fit everyone’s blood inside it?

  Trey shouts my UIC again, at which point, I am supposed to turn to Snare and salute. I do. He does. Everyone does, and then I exit stage left.

  And that’s how I become I fully-fledged Galore soldier.

  There is, of course, the necessary rituals that follow. Once every graduate is initiated, our long line (which has become four lines, seniors at the back), faces the smaller crowd of remaining initiates, and we all have some communal blood smeared onto the back of our hands by Snare. Trey follows behind him holding the bowl while we all pretend like we love being painted with other people’s bodily fluids. And by the way, the cross has no symbolic meaning. It isn’t, like, a religious gesture or anything. I’d have to assume that when Snare made up this ritual twenty years ago, he could think of no other shape to smudge onto someone’s forehead other than a cross, and so now we’re stuck with it.

  Snare says, “Initiates, salute your new leaders,” and the crowd stands at attention and salutes. We salute them in return, and just for good measure, say, “Accept, endure, obey,” one more time, in unison.

  We are applauded, and then we are done.

  I look around and watch my fellow alumni back-slap and hand shake one another as Trey’s final command echoes around the walls. Mia jumps on me from behind and throws her arms around my neck, and I pat her hand awkwardly. Soon her hands loosen, and she goes to jump on Delilah, who looks much more suitably pleased. Not everyone looks so thrilled. Some of the youngsters, the fourteen-year-olds, look dazed, maybe anxious. All of their names will be in that barrel, too.

  As the younger initiates begin to vacate the Arena, and the new members of Galore continue to converge and break in a steady wave of festivity, I decide to leave. In a nostalgic sense, I want to belong here, to this. I want to be as thrilled as they are, in the shallowest of forms, because maybe any community is better than no community at all. Like so many times before I try to talk myself into pretending, but I’m a natural imposter.

  I collect my bag from the hallway and leave. Once outside, my eyes turn left along the fence line, remembering the place where the wire is flexible enough to crawl under. I wonder if we were the first to find that spot – Dean and I, and I wonder if we will be the last. I look backwards once more to the crumbling, concrete institution and resist flipping it off.

  I frown, eyes blinking against the glare of the smoggy sky, wondering what on earth I am going to do with the rest of my life.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  At the beginning of training, Galore ensures we all safely arrive at the Compound by transporting us there themselves, but of course, there is no need for that upon completion of training. Which brings me to my current surroundings: a dirt path, surrounded on both sides by sparse grasslands. For the first time, I’ll make the journey back home totally alone, without being received on the other end.

  It doesn’t take long to put a couple of miles between the compound and I, and I find the dirt tracks that I need. Here, I stop for a moment. Breathe. I’m out. Relief almost overwhelms me. Real tears sting my eyes, and I feel giddy. I breathe in more of the crisp air, let the light touch my eyelids. No more. No more initiation training and no more Trey. Whatever else is lacking in my life, I at least can say this much.

  Stifling a laugh, I look around. In the distance, where the fields meet dense forest, I can make out Galore uniforms, moving parallel to the border of trees, about thirty feet apart. Their weapons glint every so often. I’ve never seen a border patrol detail to include so many fronters at once. I can see perhaps a mile ahead, and there are no gaps. Fronters are always tasked with guarding the main entrances to Galore: old bitumen roads leading out and over the hills. This part of Galore, the empty part, is only ever occasionally guarded, and never this heavily, so I guess they took the Resolute retreat a little more seriously than Snare let on. It looks like overkill to me; If Resolute were planning an attack on Galore, we would outnumber them 4:1, even with
a sizeable portion of our militia currently deployed.

  Anyway, they aren’t bothering me, nor I them, so on I walk. My bag cuts into my shoulder, my heels rub uncomfortably inside my boots, and I have yet to cover half of the distance I need to before I can stop. My parents would normally meet me halfway. Dad takes my bag from me, and Mum hugs me while we walk, making it twice as slow but twice as rewarding. Instead of my parents though, it is Tilly that I think of as my feet unsettle the dusty road. Tilly should have been making this journey with me. My steps quicken.

  As I draw closer I begin to look up more frequently, peering through the dull afternoon light and trying to find the first glimpses of Tilly’s house. Every now and then my eyes trick me and I think I can see smoke rising into the air, or a flickering light, but it always turns out to be fog, or a fronters’ gun, or just my imagination. Finally, as the day starts to lose all light, I see the familiar flat concrete roof ahead. Though I am still too far away to see properly, I try to make out smoke rising from a chimney, or some form of light, but there is nothing to see.

  By the time I make it to the top of the path that winds to Tilly and Julie’s house, it is evident the place is empty. Through the wire fences that separate the paddocks beyond, I can see only overgrown grass. I can smell the cattle, though. All dead.

  I walk to the house anyway, though at this point I am only expecting to find one of two things, and neither of them are good: either Julie is here, and in no better form than the animals are, or she isn’t, and there is nothing I can do to help her.

  The door is closed but unbolted, and after a quick shove, I push it inwards. For a second, I am disorientated. It seems that I’ve walked into my own home. The small kitchen table lies ahead with a wooden counter holding a large washtub against the wall. There are broken-down, fading armchairs towards my right, and a hallway on the left that leads to somewhere out of sight, though I know it will take me to two small bedrooms and a mudroom.

  It smells and looks normal. No dead body has been left lying inside. Nothing has been knocked over or disturbed, as though a struggle occurred. On the kitchen table, a large candle has been left to burnout to the bottom, and the wax has solidified to the wooden surface. A knife sits poised next to some kind of rotten root vegetable on the bench, as though someone is about to prepare it for eating. There is a book on the armchair titled Children’s knitwear. Its’ brown, abused pages curl into themselves.

  This is all I find. No Julie, and although the lead weight in my stomach reminds me that I have not kept my promise to Tilly, I can’t help but feel relieved that I didn’t have to bury what was left of her sister.

  The longer I stand in this house, the angrier I become. Angry, because we should have been here weeks ago, and now it’s too late to do what Tilly died trying to. My mouth twists in confusion, wondering where she is. I can only assume she left of her own volition, realising that she couldn’t stay here alone. Perhaps a friend came for her, or she left to seek help from wherever she could. I can’t imagine anywhere she could go.

  Or, and I do not ponder this willingly, maybe Julie is dead, her body collected, and her house yet to be reinhabited. The hole in my stomach opens again, and this time it aches for two little girls.

  I am of no use here, in this empty house. The tears welling in my eyes remind me to keep moving. I drop my bag to the dusty floor and move forwards into the tiny kitchen, pilfering through the boxes underneath the bench and almost finding nothing worth saving, until I reach the last one, where I find two solitary bags of grain, and one of more rotten roots.

  I haul the grain bags over my shoulder and trudge back to the door, bending to collect my duffel on the way, and grunting under the now much heavier load. I close the door behind me, letting it hit my shoulder as I struggle through, and blink aggressively against the moisture flowing freely now from my eyes. Talking out loud to an empty house feels crazy. Instead, I think: sorry Tilly, and then I walk out into the night.

  *

  It takes around another hour before I finally reach my own home, and by then, I’ve dumped one of the bags of grain, vowing to collect it in the morning, when my burden will be lighter. You would think it would be difficult for me to walk through that door, the house being empty and all, but my thirst and exhaustion trump any need for nostalgia and I plough through it, rushing to the tub against the back wall and sighing with relief when water trickles slowly from the steel pipe. I splash the icy water onto my face before cupping my hands and drinking from them for a few minutes. The water runs out quickly, though, and I wipe my numb hands against my hips, turning to face the room.

  There is no light, except for the blurred moon which shines through the open front door. It is enough to illuminate only shadows, but I know what the dark spots in the room are without the help a light would lend. The sewing kit my mother uses to mend our clothes sits beside the fireplace, a cup sits on the floor in front of my father’s chair, where he always sits it in the evenings. A shot gun sits propped against the wall next to the door, and the kitchen table, though clean, still holds the folded cleaning rags we use every day after dinner. I forgot these things would still be left behind. I know that sounds stupid, but when I said I would be coming home to emptiness, I had really pictured just that: emptiness. Instead, my parents are still here. They are still in this house as surely as I am, and how can I not believe that they will return to it soon? My mind keeps analysing the familiar items my eyes find, and I picture my mother stowing the utensils away, rather than leaving them on the bench like always, and hanging her apron on the nail in the wall, because she wouldn’t be using it for a while. Shivering now, I walk back to the door and close it quickly. Then, I take a lantern and a box of matches from the ground and light one. Only after the room is properly illuminated do I see it, the piece of folded paper making a tepee on my mother’s armchair, the one that faces away from the kitchen, and on it, my name is written.

  My breathing falters.

  I’m not afraid of walking alone at night, watched by fronters, or of investigating a strange house for a body. I wasn’t too afraid of my own dark, deserted house either. But of this letter, I am scared.

  I tell myself that I’m being stupid. I can see the handwriting from here, and it clearly belongs to my mother. Nothing in this letter’s contents, penned before their departure, could bring me the news of which I most dread. The thought, though, that this might be the last words I’ll learn from my parents, keeps me from wanting to read them.

  Finally, I unfold it. I allow myself to finally, mercifully, fall into the soft, creaking chair, before I read its contents:

  Contessa,

  I am sure you already know where we have gone. We are so sorry that we couldn’t greet you when you arrived home today, but know that we have missed you so much. The place has nearly fallen apart without you.

  Don’t worry about us, love. We’ll be home before you know it. And if not – you know what to do. Be safe.

  All our love,

  Mum and Dad.

  You know what to do… No I don’t. I’m not even sure where to start. I crumple up the letter in my fist and throw it into the hearth. I stand and collect the box of matches once more, and proceed to light a fire with what little is waiting for me in the fireplace. My parents’ note helps, acting as kindle. It burns and curls quickly, disintegrating quicker than the words upon it can be read.

  *

  In the morning, I wake but stay lying down for a long time. When I finally rise, the blurry sun is in the middle of the sky.

  Walking unsteadily, I make my way to the kitchen and lean against the washtub. Here, I heave, but you can’t throw up what you haven’t eaten, so the motion is useless. When I turn the faucet, nothing happens, and I remember how the water had ran dry the night before.

  Instead, I sit at the little table, and lean my forehead against the cool woodgrain. Despite my total lack of passion to do absolutely anything, the world doesn’t work this way these days. I want to si
t here and be dramatically sad, but there are at least two things that are fundamentally more important at this moment. The first is that I am insatiably thirsty and without any water, and the second is that I am hungry to the point of pain. I have to get up. While I’m at it, I should go see about the livestock, too.

  I groan. Placing both hands beside my head, I peel my face from the table’s surface and stand unsteadily. In the mudroom, I take my old, green parker from its hook and zip it up to my throat. Squinting, I step out onto the solid earth and rub my hands together.

  Water first. Rations won't be available for another couple of days. There is a well next to the main bunker, a ways out into the first field. It isn't the cleanest, so I'll have to boil it. A bucket of it should do. I collect one, and head out. It feels warmer today. The cold hasn’t settled on the grass. It still crunches beneath my boots, but no frost remains. On my way to the well my ears turn to any sound that might hint of the livestock. I don’t expect that anything will have remained here other than the poultry, but just in case.

  When I arrive at the well, I’m relieved to find there is water at the bottom and not ice. My father took the precaution to cover and insulate it before he left, of course. I place my bucket beneath the pump and begin the slow progression of filling it.

  A glint catches my eye. I look up. Ahead of me, I see the small clearing that separates our fields from the Galore boundary, and woodlands. It is the same clearing that Commander Snare spied me sitting in, and proceeded to assault me. That feels like years ago. Now, it is a fronter who occupies that clearing. He holds a rifle against his chest and sits lazily against a fallen spruce tree. When he spies me, he raises a hand. It’s not a friendly greeting as such, more like a ‘don’t mind me, I come in peace’ sort of wave. Grinding my teeth, I turn back to my bucket and collect it, slopping a decent amount of perfectly good water onto the ground in my frustration.