Mordis was grinning: situation solved. He’d steer this one into the feather-ceiling rooms, dump in some alcohol, stick some girls on top of him, and he’d be what Mordis called one blitzed-out brain-dead squeeze-dried happy zombie. And now that we had BlyssPluss, he’d get multiple orgasms and wuzzy comfy feelings, with no microbe-death downside. The furniture breakage at Scales had tanked since they’d been using that stuff. They were serving it in chocolate-dipped polyberries, and in Soylectable olives – though you had to make sure not to overdo it, said Starlite, or the guy’s dick might split.
38
In Year Fourteen, we had April Fish Day as usual. On that day you were supposed to act silly and laugh a lot. I pinned a fish onto Shackie, and Croze pinned a fish onto me, and Shackie pinned a fish onto Amanda. A lot of kids pinned fish onto Nuala, but nobody pinned a fish onto Toby because you couldn’t get behind her without her knowing. Adam One pinned a fish onto himself to make some point about God. That little brat Oates ran around shouting, “Fish fingers” and poking his fingers into people from behind until Rebecca made him stop. Then he was sad, so I took him into the corner and told him the story about the Littlest Vulture. He was a sweet boy when he wasn’t being a pest.
Zeb was away on one of his trips – he’d been going away more lately. Lucerne stayed home: she said she had nothing to celebrate, and it was a stupid festival anyway.
It was my first April Fish without Bernice. We’d always decorated a Fish Cake together when we were little, before Amanda arrived. We’d fight all the time about what to put on it. Once we’d made our cake green, with spinach for the green colour, with eyes of carrot rounds. It looked really toxic. Thinking about that cake made me want to cry. Where was Bernice now? I felt ashamed of myself, for being so unkind to her. What if she was dead, like Burt? If she was, it was partly my fault. Mostly my fault. My fault.
Amanda and I walked back to the Cheese Factory, and Shackie and Croze walked with us – to protect us, they said. Amanda laughed at that but said they could come with us if they liked. The four of us were more or less friends again, though every once in a while Croze would say to Amanda, “You still owe us,” and Amanda would tell him to get knotted.
By the time we got back to the Cheese Factory it was dark. We thought we’d be in trouble for being so late – Lucerne was always warning us about the dangers of the street – but it turned out that Zeb was back, and already they were having a fight. So we went into the hall to wait it out, because their fights took up all the room in our place.
This fight was louder than usual. A piece of furniture toppled over, or was thrown: Lucerne, it must have been, because Zeb wasn’t a thrower.
“What’s it about?” I said to Amanda. She had her ear against the door. She was shameless about eavesdropping.
“I dunno,” she said. “She’s yelling too loud. Oh wait – she says he’s having sex with Nuala.”
“Not Nuala,” I said. “He wouldn’t!” Now I knew how Bernice must have felt when we’d said all that about her father.
“Men’ll have sex with anything, given the chance,” said Amanda. “Now she’s saying he’s a pimp at heart. And he despises her and treats her like shit. I think she’s crying.”
“Maybe we should stop listening,” I said.
“Okay,” said Amanda. We stayed with our backs against the wall, waiting until Lucerne would start wailing. As she always did. Then Zeb would stomp out and slam the door, and we might not see him for days.
Zeb came out. “See you around, Queens of the Night,” he said. “Watch your backs.” He was joking with us the way he liked to do, but there wasn’t any fun behind it. He looked grim.
Usually after their fights Lucerne would go to bed and cry, but this night she started packing a bag. The bag was a pink backpack Amanda and I had gleaned. There wasn’t much for Lucerne put into it, so quite soon she finished her packing and came into our cubicle.
Amanda and I were pretending to be asleep, on our husk-filled futons, under our blue-jean quilts. “Get up, Ren,” Lucerne said to me. “We’re going.”
“Where?” I said.
“Back,” she said. “To the HelthWyzer Compound.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. Why are you looking like that? It’s what you’ve always wanted.” It’s true that I’d longed for the HelthWyzer Compound, once. I’d been homesick for it. But ever since Amanda’d moved in, I hadn’t been thinking about it too much.
“Amanda’s coming too?” I said.
“Amanda’s staying here.”
I felt very cold. “I want Amanda to come,” I said.
“Out of the question,” said Lucerne. Something else had now happened, it seemed: Lucerne had cast off her paralyzing spell, the spell of Zeb. She’d stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense. Had she been like that before, long ago? I could scarcely remember.
“Why?” I said. “Why can’t Amanda come?”
“Because they won’t let her in at HelthWyzer. We can get our identities back there, but she doesn’t have one, and I certainly don’t have the money to buy her one. They’ll take care of her here,” she added, as if Amanda was a kitten I was being forced to abandon.
“No way,” I said. “If she’s not coming, I’m not!”
“And where would you live, here?” said Lucerne with contempt.
“We’ll stay with Zeb,” I said.
“He’s never home,” said Lucerne. “You don’t think they’d let two young girls camp out by themselves!”
“Then we can live with Adam One,” I said. “Or Nuala. Or maybe Katuro.”
“Or Stuart the Screw,” said Amanda hopefully. This was desperate – Stuart was dour and a loner – but I grabbed the idea.
“We can help him make furniture,” I said. I imagined the whole scenario – Amanda and me collecting pieces of junk for Stuart, sawing and hammering and singing as we worked, making herbal tea …
“You won’t be welcome,” said Lucerne. “Stuart is a misanthrope. He only tolerates you kids because of Zeb, and it’s the same with all the others.”
“We’ll stay with Toby,” I said.
“Toby has other things to do. Now that’s enough. If Amanda can’t find someone who’ll take her in, she can always go back to the pleebrats. She belongs with them, anyway. You don’t. Now, hurry up.”
“I need to put on my clothes,” I said.
“Fine,” said Lucerne. “Ten minutes.” She left the cubicle.
“What’ll we do?” I whispered to Amanda as I started to dress.
“I don’t know,” Amanda whispered back. “Once you’re in there she’ll never let you out. Those Compounds are like castles, they’re like jails. She won’t ever let you see me. She hates me.”
“I don’t care what she thinks,” I whispered. “I’ll get out somehow.”
“My phone,” Amanda whispered. “Take it with you. You can phone me.”
“I’ll get you in somehow,” I said. By this time I was crying silently. I slipped her purple phone into my pocket.
“Hurry up, Ren,” said Lucerne.
“I’ll call you!” I whispered. “My dad will buy you an identity!”
“Sure he will,” said Amanda softly. “Don’t take shit, okay?”
In the main room, Lucerne was moving fast. She dumped out the sickly looking tomato plant she’d been growing on the windowsill. Underneath the soil there was a plastic bag full of money. She must’ve been ripping it off, from selling stuff at the Tree of Life – the soap, the vinegar, the macramé, the quilts. Money was old-fashioned, but people still used it for small things and the Gardeners wouldn’t take virtual money because they didn’t allow computers. So she’d been stashing away her escape money. She hadn’t been such a doormat as I’d thought.
Then she took the kitchen shears and cut off her long hair, straight across at neck level. The cutting made a Velcro sound – scratchy and dry. She left the pile of hair in the middle of th
e dining-room table.
Then she took me by the arm and hauled me out of our place and down the stairs. She never went out at night because of the drunks and druggies on the street corners, and the pleebrat gangs and muggers. But right then she was white-hot with anger and filled with crackling energy: people on the street cleared out of our path as if we were contagious, and even the Asian Fusions and the Blackened Redfish left us alone.
It took us hours to get through the Sinkhole and the Sewage Lagoon, and then the richer pleebs. As we went along, the houses and buildings and hotels got newer looking, and the streets emptier of people. In Big Box we got a solarcab: we drove through Golfgreens and then past a big open space, and finally right up to the gates of the HelthWyzer Compound. It was so long since I’d seen that place it was like one of those dreams, where you don’t recognize anything, yet also you do. I felt a little sick, but that might have been excitement.
Before we got into the cab, Lucerne had mussed up my hair and smeared dirt on her own face, and torn part of her dress. “Why’d you do that?” I said. But she didn’t answer.
There were two guards at the HelthWyzer gateway, behind the little window. “Identities?” they said.
“We don’t have any,” said Lucerne. “They were stolen. We were forcibly abducted.” She looked behind her, as if she was afraid someone was following us. “Please – you have to let us in, right away! My husband – he’s in Nanobioforms. He’ll tell you who I am.” She started to cry.
One of them reached for the phone, pushed a button. “Frank,” he said. “Main gate. Lady here says she’s your wife.”
“We’ll need some cheek swabs, ma’am, for the communicables,” said the second one. “Then you can wait in the holding room, pending bioform clearance and verification. Someone will be with you soon.”
In the holding room we sat on a black vinyl sofa. It was five in the morning. Lucerne picked up a magazine – NooSkins, it said on the cover. Why Live With Imperfection? She riffled through it.
“Were we forcibly abducted?” I asked her.
“Oh, my darling,” she said. “You don’t remember! You were too young! I didn’t want to tell you – I didn’t want you to be frightened! They might have done something terrible to you!” Then she began to cry again, harder. By the time the CorpSeMan in the biosuit walked in, her face was all streaky.
39
Be careful what you wish for, old Pilar used to say. I was back at the HelthWyzer Compound and I was reunited with my father, just as I used to wish long ago. But nothing felt right. All that faux marble, and the reproduction antique furniture, and the carpets in our house – none of it seemed real. It smelled funny too – like disinfectant. I missed the leafy smells, of the Gardeners, the cooking smells, even the sharp vinegar tang; even the violet biolets.
My father – Frank – hadn’t changed my room. But the four-poster bed and the pink curtains looked shrunken. It also looked too young for me. There were the plush animals I’d once loved so much, but their glass eyes looked dead. I stuffed them into the back of my closet so they wouldn’t be able to look through me as if I was a shadow.
The first night, Lucerne ran a bath for me with fake-flower bath essence in it. The big white tub and the white fluffy towels made me feel dirty, and also stinky. I stank like earth – compost earth, before it’s finished. That sour odour.
Also my skin was blue: it was the dye from the Gardener clothes. I’d never really noticed it because the showers at the Gardeners were so brief, and there weren’t any mirrors. I hadn’t noticed, either, how hairy I’d become, and that was more of a shock than my blue skin. I rubbed and rubbed at the blue: it wouldn’t come off. I looked at my toes, where they stuck up out of the bath water. The toenails looked like claws.
“Let’s put some polish on those,” Lucerne said two days later, when she saw my feet in flip-flops. She was acting as if none of it had ever happened – not the Gardeners, not Amanda, and especially not Zeb. She was wearing crisp linen suits, she’d had her hair styled and streaked. She’d already had her own toes done – she’d wasted no time. “Look at all these colours I bought for you! Green, purple, frosted orange, and I got you some sparkly ones …” But I was angry with her, and I turned away. She was such a liar.
All those years I’d kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I’d coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright, and the outline had been too large: Frank was shorter, greyer, balder, and more confused-looking than what I’d had in mind.
Before he’d come to the HelthWyzer gatehouse to identify us, I’d thought he’d be overjoyed to find that we were safe and sound and not dead after all. But when he saw me, his face fell. Now I realize that he’d last known me when I was a small girl, so I was bigger than he expected, and probably bigger than he wanted. I was also shabbier – despite the drab Gardener clothes, I must have looked like one of the pleebrats he might have seen running around if he’d ever even been to the Sinkhole or the Sewage Lagoon. Maybe he was afraid I was going to pick his pockets or grab his shoes. He approached me as if I might bite, and put his arms awkwardly around me. He smelled of complex chemicals – the kind of chemicals used for cleaning off sticky things, like glue. A smell that could burn right down into your lungs.
On that first night I slept for twelve hours, and when I woke up I found that Lucerne had taken away my Gardener clothes and burnt them. Luckily I’d hidden Amanda’s purple phone inside the plush tiger in my closet – I’d cut open the stomach. So the phone didn’t get burnt.
I missed the smell of my own skin, which had lost its salty flavour and was now soapy and perfumy. I thought about what Zeb used to say about mice – if you take them out of the mouse nest for a while and then put them back, the other mice will tear them apart. If I went back to the Gardeners with my fake-flower smell, would they tear me apart?
Lucerne took me to the HelthWyzer In-clinic so I could be checked for head lice and worms, and for being interfered with. That meant a couple of fingers up you, front and back. “Oh my goodness,” the doctor said when he saw my blue skin. “Are these bruises, dear?”
“No,” I said. “It’s dye.”
“Oh,” he said. “They made you dye yourself?”
“It’s in the clothes,” I said.
“I see,” he said. Then he made an appointment for me with the In-clinic psychiatrist, who had experience with people who’d been snatched by cults. My mother would have to be at those appointments as well.
Which was how I found out what Lucerne was telling them. We’d been grabbed off the street while in SolarSpace doing some boutique shopping, but she couldn’t say exactly where we’d been taken because she’d never been allowed to know. She said it wasn’t the fault of the cult itself – it was one of the male members who’d been obsessed with her and wanted her for his personal sex slave, and had taken away her shoes to keep her captive. This was supposed to be Zeb, though she said she didn’t know his name. I’d been too young to realize what was going on, she said, but I’d been a hostage – she’d had to do the bidding of this madman, service his every twisted whim, it was revolting the things he’d made her do – or my life would have been in danger. But she’d finally been able to share her plight with one of the other cult members – a sort of nun. She must have meant Toby. It was this woman who’d helped her to escape – brought her shoes, given her money, lured the madman away so Lucerne could make a dash for freedom.
It was no use asking me anything, she said. The cult members had been nice to me, and anyway they’d been duped. She’d been the only one who’d known the truth: it was a burden she’d had to carry alone. What woman who loved her child as much as she loved me wouldn’t have done the same?
Before our psychiatry sessions, she’d squeeze my shoulder and say, “Amanda’s back there. Keep that in mind.” Meaning that if I told anyone she’d been lying her hair off she’d suddenly remember where she’d b
een imprisoned, and the CorpSeCorps would go in there with their sprayguns, and who knew what might happen? Bystanders got killed a lot in spraygun attacks. It couldn’t be helped, said the CorpSeCorps. It was in the interests of public order.
For weeks Lucerne hovered around to make sure I wouldn’t try to run away or else rat on her. But at last I got a chance to take out Amanda’s purple phone and call. Amanda had texted me with the number of the new phone she’d lifted, so I’d know where to reach her – she thought ahead about everything. I sat inside my closet to make the call. It had a light inside, like all the closets in the house. The closet itself was as big as my former sleeping cubicle.
Amanda answered right away. There she was on the screen, looking the same as ever. I longed to be back at the Gardeners.
“I really miss you,” I said. “I’m running away as soon as I can.” But I didn’t know when that would be, I said, because Lucerne was keeping my identity locked in a drawer, and I wouldn’t be allowed past the gatehouse without it.
“Can’t you trade?” said Amanda. “With the guards?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. It’s different here.”
“Oh. What happened to your hair?”
“Lucerne made me cut it.”
“It looks okay,” said Amanda. Then she said, “They found Burt dumped in the vacant lot, out behind Scales. He had freezer burns.”
“He’d been in a freezer?”
“What was left. There were parts missing – liver, kidneys, heart. Zeb says the mobs will sell the parts, then keep the rest in the freezer until they need to send a message.”
“Ren! Where are you?” It was Lucerne, in my room.
“I have to go,” I whispered. I tucked the phone back into the tiger. “In here,” I said. My teeth were chattering. Freezers were so cold.
“What are you doing in the closet, darling?” said Lucerne. “Come and have some lunch! You’ll feel better soon!” She sounded chirpy: the crazier and more disturbed I acted, the better it was for her, because the less anyone would believe me if I told on her.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 50
