The Poison Garden

by Alex Marwood

  She worries about her sister.

  Zaria stares at the moon and Willow, after some thought, clears her throat. ‘Those shoes are slippery when they’re wet,’ she says. ‘And the moss on these rocks is horribly loose. Stupid to be climbing there.’

  It’s clearly the right response.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Uri. ‘She’s safe now.’

  The men grunt in approval and Dom switches on a torch. Jacko drops his backpack to the ground and feeds a long expanse of fabric from its top. It’s a canvas duffel bag, big enough to hold a body.

  She assumes they’ll head back up the bank to the Great House, but to her surprise they turn, once they’ve manoeuvred the corpse into its carrier, and head deeper into the woods along the path that runs the length of the river.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asks Willow.

  ‘What?’ says Jacko. ‘You think bodies bury themselves?’

  ‘She probably thinks the magic pixies do it,’ says Dom. ‘You still believe in magic pixies, 193?’

  Zaria flipflops about inside her wrapper, throwing the Guards off balance in the dark. Romy takes the chance that they are making enough noise, their speeding pulses rendering them deaf to furtive sounds in the woodland, and creeps along in their wake.

  Willow teeters on a patch of slippery mud on the riverbank, barely saves herself. The men, holding fast on to their corners of the bag, roar with laughter as they watch. So strange, the sound of laughter.

  Dead girl. It’s a dead girl, and they’re handling her like meat in a slaughterhouse.

  * * *

  * * *

  Halfway down the hill, a set of stepping stones leads across the water to the other side and the men wheel round to cross. ‘We’re going off the estate?’ asks Willow. Her voice is shaking. She’s scared, thinks Romy. More scared even than I am. She knows the stakes here as well as I do. One look, one word out of place, and she’ll be gone along with Zaria, some story concocted of Sapphic assignations or a taste for frippery, and everyone will shrug contemptuously and forget about them. But once she’s gone through with this, once she’s obeyed her orders and overcome her revulsion, Romy knows she will be even more theirs than she was before.

  ‘Set-aside,’ says Uri. ‘Area of outstanding natural beauty. The EU pays us to keep it like this.’

  ‘And a nice bit of armour against the hordes,’ says Dom. ‘By the time they get through those brambles they’ll be too tired to attack. We can pick ’em off one by one as they wade across the stream.’

  And a good place to hide things.

  They drop the bag onto the soggy ground and Jacko starts across the stepping stones to the wild land. The woods on Romy’s side are kept under control naturally, by the daily passage of foragers and guards. Firewood is collected almost before it falls and dead bracken brought up to the light to dry for kindling. Over there, the brambles entwine thick around the feet of the trees and the ferns grow to head height. Romy can’t see how they will get through it, for it grows as thick as treacle.

  Then Jacko simply picks up the landscape and lifts it aside.

  Camouflage. It’s a camouflage of deadfall. She can see, now he’s moved it, that it’s backed with cloth, the fallen sticks and foliage nailed to a frame. Behind it, a path. Clear steps up the bank and an arch of brambles into which to vanish.

  She holds her breath.

  ‘How ... many ...?’ pants Willow. ‘Where ...?’

  From up ahead, Jacko’s mocking laugh. ‘That’ll be the secret, 193. And now you know where you’ll end up if you talk about it.’

  Willow shivers, for she knows that this is not an idle threat. ‘I didn’t mean ...’

  ‘Stop making a fuss,’ says Jacko. ‘We’ll be using them for protein come the Great Disaster.’

  25 | Romy

  2010

  The Guards are drilling, and Romy, in the hemlock grove, watches with her knife in her hand, a sack of flower heads open at her feet. It’s such a tough weed, hemlock, that all she can do until the winter is make sure it doesn’t seed, and then dig up the roots when it’s dormant. And besides, dead-heading gives her a reason to hang about the Guard House without attracting attention.

  They have become magnificent. She sees that. Beneath the khaki jackets they wear in public spaces, their muscles ripple and their limbs are strong and straight. Like Lucien’s children, they are gods among the peasants. Twelve of them on morning drill, while twelve sleep off the night and twelve do the day patrol. She watches, notes, imagines the muscle movements. Kick, step, punch, kick, step, punch.

  Romy is good with her knife already. After months of solitary practice, she can flip it from pocket to hand, closed to open, in a second, the hinge oiled assiduously and worked and worked through the nights until it moves as smooth and loose as a falcon’s wing.

  But they’re strong. So strong. Stronger than Romy, stronger than all of them. Watching them punch the air, watching grain dust burst through the canvas of their improvised punch bags, leaves her awestruck. And certain that, were she to take even one on – even Willow – she would go down with the first blow.

  Only thirty-six of them – thirty-seven including Uri – but they would be strong enough to destroy us all, she thinks. None of us is trained for fighting, despite Uri’s long-unfulfilled promise to teach us. Am I the only one who sees it? Vita must, I’m sure of it. But he’s Lucien’s son and he might yet be the One, and in the end that will surely count against her.

  She has read enough history to know that a usurper is only a usurper if they fail. And that the vanquished end up in unmarked graves.

  * * *

  * * *

  The beehives are kept in their own little section of the orchard, fenced off with high evergreen hedges to keep the children out and largely avoided by people afraid of stings. When the Beemaster is on the road, he leaves her to manage the day-to-day maintenance, and she often has the whole place to herself and a reason to be there. She has never known such luxurious privacy. And it gives her a place, every morning and every evening, to drill. If she can’t find a way to prepare her fellow Drones for the onslaught, she can at least prepare herself. She does what she’s seen the Guards do. The jumps, the kicks, the lunges. Punches the air with her fists and slices it with the sides of her hands. She bends and lifts and crawls on knees and elbows, pirouettes on the spot until the earth stops spinning, hangs from branches and slowly learns to pull herself up.

  If you want to survive, you need to be prepared. Every moment of her education has taught her that.

  When the feasts approach, she watches through the slaughterhouse window to see how the butchers handle their knives. Looks to understand the casual way with which they find a jugular, cut a tendon. Volunteers to help dress the carcasses, so she can accustom herself to the feel of death.

  Zaria’s glassy eyes stare up at the moon in her dreams.

  She runs between assignments. Willow can run from the bottom of the drive to the top of the moor, a rise of three hundred and sixty feet, in fifteen minutes, so Romy must at least be faster than Willow.

  She’s running one day from the physic garden to the moor, where she’s set a hive to gather nectar from the blooming bell heather, when little Ilo drops the bucket of water he’s been bumping against his shins on his way to the chickens’ trough, and falls into step beside her. He’s seven years old now – the age at which they’re old enough to work in the afternoons and take the blame for their mishaps – and growing handsome, his eyes blue and his hair blond like a proper child of the Ark. Romy glances at him as he keeps pace with her, surprised by how fast he seems able to run.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be doing chores?’ she asks. She’s only been running for six weeks, and is delighted to find that she is already able to conduct a rudimentary conversation while doing it, even when going uphill.

  ‘I can help you,’ he replies, and
there’s barely a pant as he says it. Romy feels a bit resentful. It doesn’t seem entirely fair that she’s been training all this time to do things this child with legs two-thirds the length of her own can do with ease. He’s a natural athlete, a born survivor.

  ‘I’m not sure I need help,’ she says.

  She likes Ilo. Always has. But she’s been out of the Pigshed and working for a year now, and he’s matured so much in that time that he already seems like a semi-stranger.

  ‘Everybody needs help, though, don’t they?’ he asks. ‘I thought that was the whole point? That we can’t do it all alone?’

  ‘I suppose you have a point,’ she tells him. ‘Better keep up, though. I don’t have time to dawdle just to support weaklings.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he says cheerfully, and pulls ahead of her on the path.

  The boy can run like a greyhound. Romy is hard pressed to even maintain her dignity beside the little squit. They pound up the moorland track, eyes fixed to the ground for treacherous flints. Romy can no longer talk. It is all she can do to push through the burn in her lungs and the sweet-sharp rush of lactic acid in her legs. She can’t allow herself to be beaten by a seven-year-old. She finds another ounce of will and forges ahead. Ilo laughs out loud and passes her as though on wings.

  At the top of the moor, by the tumbledown slate wall that marks the border between their land and the National Trust’s, they collapse into the heather by the beehive. Prickling, scratching stems above and yielding peat beneath. No longer cooled by the breeze of speed, Romy feels sweat burst from her skin and her face turn purple. She is blown: spent. Rolls onto her back and feels the ache of exhaustion sweep through her limbs.

  ‘Where the hell did you learn to run like that?’

  Ilo does a shrug that consumes his whole body. ‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘I just ... can. And I want to be a Guard when I grow up, so ...’

  She rolls back onto her front, props herself up on her elbows. ‘A Guard?’

  Ilo nods.

  ‘Really? I had you pegged for an Engineer.’

  ‘It’s the obvious thing to be, if I’m going to keep you all safe.’

  Safe. The word makes the hairs on her arms rise. I saw the brain through the hole in her skull, she thinks, and pushes the thought away. ‘We’ll all keep each other safe,’ she tells him.

  He wrinkles his nose. There are freckles across the bridge, like on their mother’s, brought out by the summer sun. ‘Yes, but somebody’s got to do it properly,’ he says. ‘Eden may be the One, but she’s a long way off being able to look after herself. I know they won’t want me, but I want them. What they can teach me. So I’ve got to be the best I can be. Be better than everyone in the Pigshed. So they can’t say no.’

  The heather hums with seeking bees and a lark sings, somewhere up there in the blue. She looks at her little brother and she thinks about how best to make sure the One survives.

  ‘Well, then, you’ll need to learn to fight,’ she says, and pushes him down the slope.

  Among the Dead

  November 2016

  26 | Romy

  The driver smells – musty. As though he’s been kept in a damp cellar between trips in his car. A headful of unruly black curls, pubic sideburns all the way down to his jaw. One of those simian faces with eyes that narrow to slits when he smiles.

  ‘Looks like someone’s having a good day,’ he says, and laughs like a barking dog.

  I pull myself out of my blur of rage and size up my situation. I’m sitting on a seat that feels, from the way the frame digs into my thighs and buttocks, as though the stuffing has fallen out of it. In the gloom of the interior, I see that this car is old. Older than I am, probably. The winding handle for the window to my left has fallen off, just a cog in the door where it should be. On the dashboard, a plastic model of a piebald bull terrier nods and nods and nods, and a length of silver sticky tape holds the glove compartment closed. Around my feet, a sea of paper and old soft-drink containers.

  I look at him. He’s grinning at the road ahead through the windscreen, his teeth improbably white.

  ‘What you been up to, my duck?’ he asks. The heater blows scalding air onto my feet, yet my shoulders are surrounded with chilly autumn draught. I pull my hoodie up to cover the back of my neck. Stupid, stupid me, letting the red mist override my ability to look before I leapt.

  ‘Been to visit my grandparents,’ I tell him.

  ‘Grandparents, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. Not sure how to play this. Friendly, so he thinks he sees a come-on, or standoffish, which would be likely to enrage? Or tough, so he knows not to fuck with me?

  ‘And what do they think to a great-grandbabby?’ he asks.

  Babby. There’s something primeval about the misuse of the word. I’m in a lot of trouble, here. ‘They’re old-fashioned,’ I say.

  That laugh again. ‘Babby got no daddy, eh?’

  I’m going for standoffish. Let him think I’m a dumb chick who thinks that grand manners are enough to keep her safe. ‘What an intrusive question,’ I say.

  The grin flashes off. ‘Oh, no offence, maid,’ he says, and turns onto the motorway slip road. We’ve not slowed down enough at any point for me to try the door. Not without risking harm to you, baby. ‘Although on second thoughts it’s a bit late to be calling you maid, eh?’

  He puts his foot down as we hit the motorway and the car roars and lurches into the centre lane. I’m probably safe at eighty miles per hour. It’s when we return to the side roads that I need to be prepared.

  Maybe if I engage him. At least I can get the measure of him then. He might just be very, very stupid; not realise how he comes across. Or I might be paranoid. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility; I was raised paranoid. And he’s not done anything yet. Much.

  ‘So where are you off to?’ I ask.

  ‘That depends,’ he says, and gives me a flash of his big white teeth. Falsies, I think. No way they’d be that white in a face so begrimed. He puts his hand on his gearstick and caresses it with his thumb.

  We pass Reading, then Slough, in silence. He weaves in and out of the fast lane while I stare ahead through the windscreen. Then he hits his indicator and turns off, goes through a tunnel under the motorway, and takes us along a road leading south. Winter trees, scrubby undergrowth, no people.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘Short cut,’ he says.

  Every bone, every hair, on my body, is alert now. ‘Short cut to where?’

  ‘I told you,’ he says. ‘That depends.’

  I look out through my side window. We’re entering an area of scruffy old storage units. The sort of dead zone that lurks on the edge of every town I’ve ever been through. Streetlights illuminate shuttered doors and blank, windowless corrugated walls. Weeds grow up through potholed concrete; skips are filled with wooden pallets and broken chairs. The Outside is full of places like this: places where buildings have lost their purpose and everyone who used to come there has moved on and left them behind.

  ‘Costs me a lot in petrol, this,’ he says, and that thumb strokes, strokes, strokes.

  Oh, Romy, you are in so much trouble. Don’t say anything. Don’t speak. Anything you say will sound like you’re afraid.

  ‘How you going to pay me back, maid?’

  In a broad stretch of emptiness, a crossing signal turns red and he pulls to a halt. Nowhere to run to, but I grab my chance, pull on the door handle. It flips loosely in my hand, and nothing happens. That face turns towards me and he grins: a death’s head that smells of tobacco smoke and sebaceous secretions.

  He pulls away. Swings the wheel and pulls into a cul-de-sac. Metal walls and a high brick border, no light. Elder and buddleia shedding fading leaves, their roots embedded in the gaps between the walls, their feet buried, like mine, in litter. That wall in the headlights is
too high for scaling, even if I were fit.

  ‘Back in a minute, maid,’ he says.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Need a slash,’ he says. ‘Don’t you be going anywhere, eh?’

  I test him. Make a move to put him at his ease, give him reason to think he’s the one with the power. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ I say.

  The grin again. ‘Why, maid, whatever makes you think I’m going to do that?’

  Options. I cycle through them as he stands with his back to me in the headlights, raising himself up and down on the balls of his feet as though the better to pump urine from his bladder. Wriggle myself behind the steering wheel to his door and trust that I can do it fast enough to get out before he’s back on top of me? Run? Not an option. I could outpace him with ease, even as I am, but I can only outpace a moving car if I have somewhere to run to. Steal the car? He took the keys with him when he went. Talk my way out? He doesn’t seem like a talker.

  I slide my knife from its holster and slip it into my hoodie pocket.

  I see him zip his jeans up, and then his head drops and he becomes immobile. I wait. It’s gone silent inside right now. Where there should be a person, a personality, is a howling void. All that empty blackness, waiting to be filled. I put my hand in my pocket, caress the handle of my knife, rest my thumb on the button that will make it spring open. It feels solid. It comforts me.

  When he comes, he comes fast. His head snaps upright, and then he’s running towards me, and in the headlights his face is the face of the devil.