‘Dammit, Frannie, will you please stop hollering at me? I’m doing my damned best.’
Frannie stopped and turned to him. Her shock was replaced with a sudden look of fondness, and she placed a hand on his face. ‘I’m sorry, Harold. I know you are.’ She gave him a long, tender kiss, than patted his cheek gently. ‘Now, are we going to do this thing or what?’
Harold smiled. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
There were footsteps on the jetty and we turned to see Curtis again.
‘You all right?’ he said. We nodded. ‘Good. Come with me, I want to show you something.’
Chapter 30
Curtis led us between the garbage heaps. There were voices ahead, and when we turned the final bend I was surprised to see a wide clearing, most of which was taken over by a blue, steaming lagoon. Around it were huts, workbenches and a kitchen in which a small, nervous lady with deep black skin and bottle-thick glasses moved between pots and sizzling platters. The smell was intoxicating, a rich liquor of herbs, spices and fried onions.
‘Nice of you to join us,’ said Bryce, raising a bottle of water. He and Carmela were sitting in one corner of the lagoon – him shirtless, Carmela still wearing an enormous black bra – and some distance from them sat Richard. He nodded up at us, but said nothing.
Five of our hosts were also in the water; Mikey, the bearded, big-bellied man with long hair and wrap-around sunglasses; Rhona, who had removed her dress and sat like Carmela in her underwear; an enormous, white-grinned black man in a red T-shirt and aviators and, next to him, a muscle-bound, square-jawed white man with spectacularly hooked eyebrows. He seemed the youngest of the lot, probably in his early sixties. He and the man in the red T-shirt were currently engaged in conversation, while Rhona and Mikey were trying to encourage Dani and Josh to enter the water. They were sitting on battered sun loungers.
‘Come on in,’ said Rhona, ‘we don’t bite.’
‘Don’t have the teeth for it,’ said Mikey, laughing. He spoke with the open vowels of a New Englander.
Dani and Josh shared a look, and Josh shook his head. ‘No thanks, we’re good.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She turned to us. ‘What about you pair?’ She exaggerated a terrible English accent. ‘Care for a dip?’
This made her and Mikey scream with laughter. Curtis just shook his head. ‘Rhona, Rhona, Rhona, when will you learn? Our guests are Scottish, north of the border.’
Rhona wiped an eye and shrugged. ‘Sorry, my bad.’ She affected an even worse Groundskeeper Wully voice. ‘Wud ye ceeeer furrra dup?’
She and Mikey collapsed in further giggles.
Curtis looked at us, embarrassed. ‘Some of our number ain’t so worldly wise.’
I smiled. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘You should try the water though,’ he said. ‘It’s hellish good.’
I took in the crystal pool. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on its surface.
‘How did you do this?’
Mikey slapped the side proudly and pointed to one of the nearby huts.
‘Rainwater, triple-filtered, naturally heated and pumped using solar panels. It’s what we drink, and it’s what we bathe in. Come in and try it.’
Rhona caught my hesitation. ‘Oh, don’t you worry now, your dignity is perfectly safe. I doubt any of these old boys could muster a hard-on between ’em.’
At this, the square-jawed man looked up, curling one already obscenely curled eyebrow even higher.
‘Speak for yourself,’ he said. His voice was surprisingly high and nasal, with a little lisp. He looked at me. ‘But my pecker don’t pose no problems to you, sister, nor your man.’ He grinned, looking sideways across the pool at Bryce. ‘Can’t say the same for everyone, though.’
‘Leopold,’ warned Rhona.
Carmela scowled at him, but Bryce grinned and raised his bottle. ‘Wouldnae blame you, buddy, wouldnae blame you.’
Ed looked at me. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it’s high time we had a bath,’ I replied.
With my stump propped on the poolside, Ed helped me in. The water had the same effect on my body as it did on my throat; an intense relief, followed by near tears of happiness. My muscles uncoiled like slackening springs, and as Ed slipped in beside me, his look told me he was feeling the same.
‘There y’go,’ said the man in the red T-shirt. ‘Feels good, don’t it?’ He removed his shades and reached across, offering his right hand. ‘Name’s Johnson.’
We each shook it.
‘Beth.’
‘Ed.’
‘Pleased to meet you. And this is my man, Leopold.’
‘He ain’t my man,’ said Leopold, with a look of scorn. ‘My man—’
‘Oh boy, here we go,’ said Johnson, slouching against the wall and sending a bow wave across the lagoon in the process.
‘My man is far from here,’ continued Leopold. ‘And a good fucking thing too.’
‘What happened?’ I said.
Leopold leaned in. ‘Caught him ball-deep in our pool boy, that’s what happened. Yep. Used to live in a Manhattan condo—’
‘Huh,’ huffed Johnson, jabbing a thumb at him, ‘only fucking soul alive who did. Why d’you live in Manhattan when you could have lived in Brooklyn? Or Queens? Hell, even this dump would have been better.’
‘I – I mean we – happened to like Manhattan, thank you very much. Besides –’ he crossed his arms ‘– least we had a home. Not like you bunch o’ vagrants.’
He chuckled. Johnson laughed and raised a hand, which Leopold high-fived.
‘True, true, brother,’ said Johnson. ‘True, true.’
Meanwhile Curtis had removed his trench coat and slipped in beside us.
‘Hoo, there you go, there you go, that’s nice. Now, where are my manners. Y’already met these fine gentlemen, Leopold and Johnson.’
They each raised a hand at their name.
‘Charmed.’
‘Hey.’
‘Leopold’s our Dallas cowboy, ain’t that right, Leo? And I’m Curtis, you know that. Let’s see now, there’s Mikey from Maine, met him, and Rhona all the way from Calli-fawn-eye-ay. Who else? You met Harold and Francesca at the boat and, ah yes, that little bundle of joy over there in the kitchen is Evie.’
Evie looked up from a pot and gave us a curt nod, pushing her steamed-up spectacles up her nose.
‘Evie, well, she don’t say much, but it don’t make us love her any less. And finally, there’s –’ he looked around ‘– where’s Suyin?’
Mikey jabbed a thumb behind him.
‘Still in the supply shed working on that irrigator. Guessing we won’t see her tonight.’
‘Huh.’ Curtis turned to us. ‘Suyin has a technical mind. Not easy to break focus, if you understand what I’m saying. Hope you don’t take it personal or nothing if she doesn’t join the pool party.’
He grinned. I looked around the lagoon. Smells of the sea were wafting from Evie’s kitchen, and the sun was dipping behind the highest trash mountain, sending a cascade of countless diamonds glinting from its summit.
‘Who are you all?’ I said. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Like Leo so accurately implied,’ said Johnson, holding out his hands, ‘we’re vagrants.’
‘Hobos,’ said Mikey.
‘Wayfarers,’ said Rhona.
‘Bag ladies,’ squeaked Evie from the kitchen.
‘We’re homeless, Beth,’ said Curtis. ‘Least, we were.’
‘They were homeless,’ said Leopold. ‘I just wound up here when those things fell down. I was drunk.’ His face soured. ‘On account of that fucking pool boy.’
They told us their stories.
It had been 11 p.m. in New York when the asteroids fell. Leopold, in a state of woeful inebriation, had left the Wall Street bar in which he had been drowning his sorrows and stumbled onto the Staten Island Ferry. Nursing a brown-bagged bottle of Wild Turkey he watched the spectacle of the Manhattan skyline exploding f
rom the summit of one of the Fresh Kills slag heaps. The landfill – once one of the biggest in the world – had been closed years before, Johnson told me, and its waste mountains capped in protective layers.
But it didn’t take much for those caps to burst open when the asteroids reached Staten Island.
It was as Leopold stood with his arms out, shouting, ‘Take me, you bastards. Take me to hell!’ that Johnson found him, dragged him from the slag heap and down to a bunker by the wharf, where they sheltered as the great rocks tore the island apart.
Emerging later, they found themselves drifting far from where they had been. A small piece of the island, what constituted Fresh Kills, had broken off and found its way out to sea.
This is where the details became shaky.
‘That’s not how it happened,’ scoffed Leopold. ‘I weren’t that drunk.’
‘Yeah, you were.’
‘Actually,’ said Curtis, ‘it wasn’t the asteroids that broke the landfills out, it was the breaking apart itself that—’
‘Horseshit,’ said Rhona, waving a hand at him. ‘I was there, I saw the whole thing. Those things burst like boils on a butt.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Mikey, raising an eyebrow. ‘And how did you see all this, Missy? You wearing some protective bio suit or something?’
‘I saw it from the outreach centre, dummy.’
‘Oh yeah? So how come you ended up on Fresh Kills?’
‘’Cos the outreach centre blew up.’
‘Boom!’ said Evie, shaking a skillet.
Bryce watched them argue, delighted. Richard seemed less enthused, glancing every now and again at Josh.
‘How many times we been over this, Mikey?’ said Rhona.
‘I don’t know.’ He gave her a sideways glance. ‘But it gets crazier every damn time.’
They ceased their bickering, and Johnson grinned at me. ‘All we know is, when daylight came we were here, floating away from the mainland and surrounded by all this trash.’
‘That’s our truth,’ said Leopold, ‘and we’re sticking with it.’
‘Truth.’ The others echoed.
‘Now we’ve told you our story,’ said Mikey. ‘What’s yours?’
We told them everything, from Bonaly, the barracks, and the camp at Falmouth to Ed, Bryce and Richard’s journey across the country. I listened to Ed recount this part of the story with wonder, as unable to believe in it as I was unable to believe in the lines of muscle definition that had apparently appeared on his shoulders and abdomen. Then I told them of the SS Unity, of Mary, of Gibraltar, Tony and our crossing.
When we were done, they were silent.
‘Holy shit,’ said Johnson. ‘And I thought our story was tall.’
Rhona smiled and touched a pendant around her neck. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll find your children. I know it.’
Evie banged the side of a pot with a spoon, crying, ‘Service!’, and all eyes turned to the kitchen.
‘You stay there,’ said Curtis, getting out. ‘Mikey, do you think this occasion calls for something special?’
‘Amen to that,’ said Mikey, waggling his palms like a preacher. He rose from the lagoon and disappeared into a shack, from which we heard the chink of glass. When he returned he was carrying a dark, unlabelled bottle with a stopper, which he presented to us as if he were a wine waiter, clearing his throat.
‘Sir, madam, a bottle of Staten Island’s finest for you. Do you approve?’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘That all depends on what’s in it.’
Mikey wrinkled his nose and pulled the cork. ‘Best not think about that too much.’
As he poured us glasses – Bryce knocked his back and motioned for an immediate refill – Curtis brought us deep tins of delicious-smelling fish stew. Then he raised his glass.
‘To friends old and new,’ he said, and turned to me. ‘And future shores.’
We drank, and while I was expecting some acrid gut-clenching petrol, I was rewarded by a sweet, cherry-like taste that warmed my chest. We drank some more, ate the fish and told countless stories beneath a whirling canopy of stars. Harold and Francesca joined us, and Evie sat with her feet dangling in the water. We laughed, and cried, and laughed some more until sleep took us to our beds, and Ed and I curled up on Rhona’s mattress and drifted away to the sound of waves crashing against a metal shore, and wind chimes made of bottle tops and spoons.
Chapter 31
I was woken by Johnson’s shadow and a fresh, smoky aroma.
‘Wakey-wakey,’ he said, handing me a chipped tin steaming cup. ‘I know you British like your tea, but all we got is coffee. And there ain’t no milk. Hope that’s all right with you.’
I sat up and took the cup, breathing in the rich, dark fumes.
‘Coffee’s perfect. Thank you.’
‘Good.’ He grinned. ‘Breakfast’s cooking poolside. Don’t be late or you’ll miss the bacon.’
‘Bacon?’
His grin grew wider and he shook his head. ‘It ain’t really bacon.’
He slammed the roof twice and disappeared back down the road. It was already warm. I put my coffee down and stretched my leg for inspection. The bandage came off easily and there was no sign of infection beneath it. I retied it and sat for a few moments, enjoying the peace and my coffee.
But as always my thoughts returned to Alice and Arthur, and before I knew it I was out of the shack, hobbling to the shore.
Harold and Francesca were already working on the boat. Francesca was on deck, pulling on a lever while Harold hammered at something below.
‘Morning, miss,’ she said brightly. ‘Sleep OK?’
‘I did, thank you. Er …’
‘When are we finished?’ She stood straight and wiped her hands. ‘Hard to tell, but I believe we could use some help now so you tell your boys, you hear me? And maybe we can get you floatin’ by sundown, how about that?’
‘I’ll tell them.’
‘Good. Now I’d get to your breakfast or—’
‘I’ll miss the bacon. Right.’
She cackled as I turned and made my way back to the path.
‘It ain’t really bacon, missy!’
Whatever it was it filled a hole, and I had three more cups of coffee, my strength returning with every one. There were eggs too, and when I asked Curtis how this was possible he winked and took me on a walk around Fresh Kills. They had a vegetable patch, tended by Evie and Mikey, on which they grew potatoes, yams, carrots and a peculiar tight-leafed lettuce. They had reclaimed compost from the heaps and built a processing area in which they sorted through the endless mounds of garbage for useful objects. They had to be careful, he told me with a haunted look, because Fresh Kills had been used as a temporary storage area for wreckage after the towers fell. Some human remains still lurked within the mountains.
They had a fuel station, in which they drained and stored gasoline and diesel from the many car engines that had sunk into the mounds, and sometimes even from full spare tanks. It never ceased to amaze him, Curtis told me with shining eyes, what people liked to throw out.
There was a food processing unit where they assessed the many full tins and bottles they found. Corn, beef stew, vegetables, tomatoes, pasta and – to their occasional delight – liquor.
And there was a fishing jetty, complete with a hut for gutting, hanging and smoking their catches.
And they also had a chicken coop.
This was another mystery, Curtis told me as he peered through the fence at the five scrawny hens and a saggy-necked cockerel. But the God’s honest truth, he said, was that they found them wandering through the trash the day they realised they had been cut loose from the great American continent. They must have belonged to a Staten Island resident, he mused, and found themselves along for the ride. In any case, they provided regular protein, and eventually there would be chicks.
Curtis kneeled and reached for some of the sparse grain on the ground, offering it to a hen. She came cautiously, head jabbi
ng, and gently pecked at his fingers. His face lit with glee at the touch of her beak, and he chuckled.
‘These are my girls,’ he said. ‘My dad had hens when I was a kid – 1950s, Oklahoma, that’s where I grew up. Had about twenty of ’em. Names for all of them. I used to feed them, clean them, collect their eggs, every single day, I –’ he paused, the words stuck in his throat ‘– I had to kill one once.’
With the grain gone the hen returned to her endless hunt for more. Curtis stood, brushing his hands.
‘Guess I’ll have to again one day.’
From the glistening in his eye, I suspected times would have to get pretty bad before that happened.
‘Was it a big farm?’ I asked.
‘Huh? Naw, naw, we were poor as shit. Fact –’ he laughed ‘– I ain’t never had more than a dollar in my pocket any day of my life. But look at me now.’ He raised his arms to the mounds around him. ‘I’m a rich man.’
We spent all morning walking around the island. It was about as big as a cricket pitch, and my boathook crutch made progress slow.
‘Let’s go see about that leg,’ said Curtis.
He took me back to a road leading inland from the pool, and stopped at a larger shack than the others. There was a rugged patch of tilled earth outside it, in which herbs and an anaemic tomato bush grew beneath netting. He rapped on the door and called a greeting, then led me in. It was cool and dark inside, and smells of ginger and jasmine from a small, bubbling pot in the corner mingled with engine oil and burned plastic. The roof was supported by three tall posts, and although I could not make out much in the low light, the space felt as if it was filled with objects. At a workbench beneath a window, hunched over a circuit board with a soldering iron and an eyepiece normally seen on a jeweller, sat a lady in a shawl.
‘Hello, Suyin,’ said Curtis. She looked around and a wide, studious face greeted me.
‘It’s OK,’ Curtis whispered to me, ‘I told her about you.’
Suyin took off her eyepiece and got to her feet.
‘You the lady with no foot.’
The End of the World Survivors Club Page 28
