Careering sharply to the left, their vessel’s flight path turns back on itself like a broken elbow. Plumes of smoke swell from the ship’s undercarriage.
“Look,” Ned repeats, pointing at the battle geese descending upon them. Yellow and red starbursts bloom from metallic wings as the flock glides closer. Echoing bursts project skyward from below as earthbound creatures answer the birds’ colourful calls.
“Don’t be scared, Tantie. I won’t let anything happen to you. Promise.”
Wait ’til I tell Mamie about this, Ned thinks. How lucky we are to see all this up close! The ship plunges through a chequerboard of orange and red. Ned’s ’wind flounders, turns green. The turbulence upsets her stomach. Tantie clasps Ned’s hand, draws her small head to her breast.
“Don’t be scared, Tantie,” Ned says as her not-aunt’s wordwind falls like a curtain before her eyes. Ned waves her aunt’s skittish words away, gently, careful not to bruise. Turns back to the events unfolding outside her window.
Hills festooned with blackened trees seem to dart upwards, drawing the ship down, until the clouds are once more far, far above. The ship plummets with wondrous speed. Ned sits still, riveted to the view. Her ’wind latches on to Tantie’s, losing some of its shine in the process.
“Don’t be scared,” Ned repeats while the earth rushes up to meet their ship. “Don’t be scared.”
Standing on a footstool she found on the green road last week, Mireille presses against the cold window casement and peers through a missing slat in the blinds. Outside, rubble slopes from the roadside to her second-storey apartment, piled two-thirds of the way up the window’s glass. At the top of the heap, cinderblocks and bricks. Rinds of rubber. Shredded newspapers. Plastic packaging gone brittle, disintegrating in the dry air. No trace of leaves or roots or forgotten ’winds. Not in this country, she thinks, this flamboyant city, where people talk and talk and talk without ever revealing true thoughts. Further down the panel, near the ledge, shredded rat leather is squashed between layers of fabric. Fur and tartan, both colourless with dust. And poking out of—a cardigan? a skirt?—small, fractured bones. Poor little things, she thinks. Poor little things. She can’t bear to look at them. Day and night, the blinds are kept drawn. A long, thin rectangle of light sneaks into the living room, greying a streak across Mireille’s eyes as she stretches up, tiptoe, on her latest treasure. Stealing glimpses out through the gap.
Across the road, a crew of sweating, ox-armed men peck at two-metre banks of wreckage with pickaxes and shovels. In the past hour, they’ve shifted wagonloads of concrete, slate, twisted steel bars, torn awnings, dented tin. Nothing decorative. Nothing useful. But they’ve widened the thoroughfare by a good few inches. Now part of a gutter emerges, a foot of the curb.
If I don’t blink before they hit sidewalk, Mireille thinks, then Peyt will be back home before May and Neddie get here.
Ten seconds pass.
Her eyes start to burn.
Sidewalks will be good, she thinks, squinting against the sting. Neddie can easily push our little barrow around while I fill it. Fifteen seconds. Or we can take turns: the girl’s got a good eye for pattern and sparkle. And—twenty seconds—Ned’s small enough to fit under that fence at the Neuemarkethub… . Thirty-two seconds. For weeks, Mireille’s had her eye on a corner of gilded wood, poking up like an elbow from the half-caved ruins of a hotel three blocks away. She’s sure it’s a picture frame—and, judging from the corner, it’s a big one—but the property is cordoned-off, the chain link too low for her to wriggle beneath, the top edge barbed with rusting wire and shards of glass.
Thirty-nine seconds and there’s a harsh tingling in her sinuses. As the workmen cart off another load, jets arrowhead out from the clouds. Three of the guys down tools and gawk stupidly up, mouths moving silently in the glass-rattling noise. Forty-six seconds. The ships move as one toward a towering column in the distance, a sleek concrete shaft girded and buttressed with iron, its pinnacle miles above the clouds. They’re going to crash, Mireille thinks. They’re going to explode. Her breath rasps in and out. The blinds clatter. Tingling becomes tickling. Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Save yourselves, she thinks furiously, ’wind cursing worse than Peyt’s. And as the fighters veer left at the last instant, noses angled down, spitting fire into the valley beyond, Mireille’s sigh catches. Eyes watering, she tilts her head back and sneezes. Twice. Blinking both times.
Doesn’t count, she thinks, sleeving tears from her cheeks and invisible grime from the venetians. Interference.
Bursts of green over the city become orange concussions on the ground, fallout drifting around high rises and cranes. Another flock of steel wings appears overhead and the workmen vanish. The grocer on the corner—who laces his grain with sawdust, and would sell flambeaux in the middle of a firestorm—has battened down his red and white awnings and sandbagged the door. Kids race out of the public toilets, a cinderblock structure near the pump and well, that stinks like shit no matter how much lime gets crushed on its thick walls. Naked, dropping towels they’ll be punished for losing, they run themselves dirty; back down alleyways or through gaps in the fences around their parents’ businesses and homes. Up and down the street, people go indoors then reappear, crowding apartment balconies. Families of old men and young women. Children small enough to be carried. Teenagers with thick specs stooped over railings. Talking. Smoking herbs and wrappers, filling lungs with plastic and tar. All of them watching. Waiting for action before the all-clear.
Inside her new quarters, Mireille gnaws a hangnail. Feels the sting as the thread of skin tears from her finger. Footsteps thunder past her front door, then up a set of stairs at the end of the hall. One or two floors above, a door slams. On the living room wall behind her, a cuckoo clock starts hooting the hour. Outside, clouds boom. Green and orange and billowing oceans of grey.
Mireille wonders if Peyt’s in one of the ships up there, coasting the gloom, shelling targets. She wonders how much of his own sadness and anger have fuelled those bombs. No matter how much emotion he pours into the job, she thinks, it seems there’s always more. Just thinking about what the greys did back home generates all the ammunition he needs to keep fighting. All those people stolen, all those poor, poor people packed into the stadium and ignited—massacred—with grey magic. Thirty thousand, Peyt kept repeating, when he came in with the news that night. A five-mile blast radius. Buildings smashed like toothpicks all around. Two-thirds of the CBD decimated in a matter of blinks. The museum, the historic gardens, the repat hospital. Everything around the stadium. Gone. And thirty thousand people inside. Outside, so many more.
“What if Neddie had been one of them,” Mireille remembers saying. “What if they’d stolen our little Ned?” Peyt had stared at her. At the colicky baby grizzling on her lap. Expression blank as a stranger’s. “What’s the fuckin’ point?” There’d been no venom in his voice then—he kept that for the next day, when PM Cardea’s body was reported found in the bathtub, bled out and screenless. And the next, at her tribute, when the gov’t laid blame for the city’s destruction, squarely—and fairly, Mireille still thinks—at the greys’ feet.
Details might’ve blurred with the passing years, the hows, the whos, the whys, but she will never forget the hurt in that question. “What’s the fuckin’ point?” The hurt, the actual physical pain—and, yes, even the pride—of seeing Peyt walk out the door a week later, hours before dawn, bearing satchels and rucksack and reinforced hood, a soldier bent on finding an answer.
“Fight hard,” she’d said, whispering to keep from waking the baby. “Fight careful. Ned would like her Papa back in one piece.”
Peyt’s expression was inscrutable. Part frown, part disbelief.
In hindsight, Mireille realises she did this a lot. Put her words in Ned’s mouth instead of voicing them herself. “She sure loves her Papa,” she’d say, or “Look how she smiles to see you!” At the time, she’d given Ned all the credit for loving him. Missing him.
“Maybe you’ll be assigned to your old platoon,” she’d said, having no idea how these things worked, but wanting to talk to him, to stall him just that much longer before he went off to war. “Is that what happens when you go back?”
She remembers his relief that she hadn’t begged him to stay. Hadn’t begged him to explain why he was going. It was visible, palpable. After kissing Ned goodbye, he’d stood a bit straighter. He’d heaved a huge sigh. He’d looked at Mireille and almost smiled.
“I don’t know how—”
A soldier’s burden is heavy enough, she’d thought, waving the rest of Peyt’s sentence away. He doesn’t leave his family easily or willingly. He goes because he must. Because it is right.
“We’ll be here,” she’s said. Then, spontaneously, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
Mireille swallowed. “Protecting us.”
Peyt had flinched, too humble for praise or thanks, even when it was due. Mireille had cupped his scruffy chin, kissed her mouth raw on his stubble. Despite what the mothers used to say, Mireille had thought as the door shut behind him, there is pride in action. Pride and love and fear.
Four months until he came home, missing Ned’s first birthday by three days. While Tantie May fed the child mash and biscuits for breakfast, Mireille had welcomed Peyt back to her bed.
“How long’s your leave?” she’d asked, fumbling with his belt. The leather was cracked and swollen, squeaking as she forced it from loops and buckle.
“I’m tired, Mimi,” he’d said. He always says. Pressing her hungry hands firm against his smooth belly, he crossed his legs. Closed his eyes. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
Two more bombs in quick succession and a third blaring a few miles behind.
If the last mushroom dissolves before the clock strikes nine, she thinks, I’ll hear from Peyt today. Her ’wind cheers the plume on—hurry hurry hurry—and a skyscraper collapses in its wake. A subsonic rumbling of brick to earth. Air currents rushing to fill its negative space. Smoke quickly dispersing. The sky loses its sickening hue, fades to a dull silver-white, the mushroom gone after only eight hoots of the cuckoo.
That’s it, Mireille thinks, hopping down from the stool. A good sign. Looks like I’m going out.
Her latest theory—proven, she thinks, by the certainty in her gut and the absence of ringing in her ears—is that the rubble around the apartment blocks mentalegraph signals. That’s why she hasn’t heard from Peyt or Tantie May for so long. She sneezes again, rubs her nose. Yes, she thinks. That’s exactly it. Interference.
Before leaving the apartment, Mireille always dresses in many layers. Leggings under pants under a shin-length woollen skirt. Two tank tops under a long-sleeved thermal jersey under a loose t-shirt. A button-up cardigan tied round her waist. Ankle-socks under a lucky cotton pair that haven’t yet needed darning. The calendar says it’s early autumn, but the wind says it’s winter. No matter the season, Mireille bundles up in case of ifs.
If she gets lost.
If she loses her house to a worthier keeper.
If the greys destroy it.
If she has to start over, again.
The bedroom is smaller than the one she and Peyt left behind—a mattress and box-spring, no frame; a three-legged table on her side, wood with steel rivets; a lowboy on his, topped with two trinket boxes, a silver-backed hairbrush, and an ugly bird-faced mask—but the wardrobe is almost walk-in and has plenty of shelves. Not empty, she thinks, looking at the chipboard surfaces, scrubbed and painted white. Waiting to be filled.
Stepping in, she reaches up to take her hat from its round box—and finds herself immersed in Peyt. Salt and skin and a spice she can’t quite place, a bit like roast rabbit. Her hands drop, now arranging the hangers, sad standins for Peytr’s lean shoulders. She’s collected a pair of pants for him and a collared shirt; a day’s soaking and scrubbing got out all the stains and she stitched the little holes so tidily they’re practically invisible. Peyt’s camouflage jacket hangs beside the red shirt she found in his backpack a while ago. “Such a beautiful colour,” she’d said, expecting a bag full of faded laundry, finding instead a shimmer of diamond dust covering this scarlet prize. “It’s like all those robes we found once in the museum. Remember? Such a brilliant colour. Why don’t you wear it?”
“Chafes,” he replied, but the fabric was soft as Ned’s fine hair. Beneath the canvas mustiness, a faint scent of lemon.
Now Mireille pushes the shirt aside, takes a scarf from the hooks at the back of the closet. Slides the hatbox off the top shelf, tucks it under her arm. With a frown, she gets her trench coat from beside Peyt’s jacket.
He’d forget his own head if it wasn’t screwed on, she thinks, hoping the regiment will issue him replacement multicams in the meantime.
Heading back to the lounge, she practises looking in on Ned. Leaning against the doorframe of the master bedroom, she crosses her arms, and pretends the girl is sleeping on the little cot she’d bought for her at the army surplus. Tantie May’s new bunk is a slender single crammed in next to Ned’s—but that’s okay, Mireille thinks. May is so skinny, you could fit three of her on there and still have space for Neddie to crawl in when she’s scared. Mireille flicks a switch and indulges in the sound of gas piping into frosted glass wall sconces the previous tenants had installed. Taking a box of matches from her coat pocket, she lights the closest bulb and lets it burn for a minute.
Not as bright as the old electrics back home, she thinks. But no doubt Neddie will think they’re tapping dragonfire, bottling the power of fireflies or some such. Mireille can just hear her now, inventing reasons why it’s so dim in here, even with the lights on. Why she has to squint to see her schoolbooks. “It’s glow-in-the-dark ink, Mamie.” Or “I’ve eaten so many carrots, I’ve got perfect night vision!” Or “If the greys can’t see me, they won’t know where to sweep …”
And Tantie May will roll her eyes and try to snip the girl’s ’wind before it gets too rowdy.
May is so good with Neddie, Mireille thinks, snuffing the lamp. I couldn’t have asked for a better caretaker. But as she closes the door behind her and crosses to the living room couch—a hideous thing, flaking brown leather-snow when she sits to lace her boots—Mireille’s stomach churns. It burns that the army wouldn’t fund their travel, burns that they couldn’t all move together, burns that Peyt didn’t take the issue up with his—who? His Commander? His General? Mireille has no idea—all she knows is he should’ve tried.
“Not even one more ticket? One set of papers? We can send for May later,” her belly still squirms at the traitorous thought, “if only we can bring Neddie …”
“I need to go,” Peyt had said. No arguing with that tone, that twitch in his jaw. “I have to. The way things are here, now… .” Mireille had seen how much the thought of leaving pained him. She’d understood. He was devoted to family; yeah, he was a family man. It hurt him, she knew, to suggest she stay behind. That she travel with Neddie and May once he’d got settled. Once he could afford the requisite bribes.
It’s luxury enough for grunts to move their girls close to the base, Tantie had explained afterwards. Dragging everyone else isn’t just selfish. It’s obscene.
“Living with a soldier,” Mireille had quipped, “you get used to obscenities.”
Like when Peyt had said, “I’ll send a Pigeon for the three of you. As soon as I can.”
That was obscene. Mireille wouldn’t wait for a Pigeon.
So she went with him.
They don’t have a kitchen, per se.
A dinged-up gas hob shares a wall with the bedroom. Beside it, a deep steel basin with working drainpipe but no faucets. In front of the window, a speckled Formica table, square with chrome edgings, which they’ll all use for dinner and cards. At the moment, there’s only one chair—red vinyl with a fat cream stripe on the seat and back—and a single matching cup and saucer. They’ll need at least three more. Four, if she can get them.
Placing
the hatbox on the table, Mireille sits. Puts on the fedora inside, then tips the box, releasing a small avalanche of papers. Handwritten bills. Faded receipts. Scraps of cardboard packaging sapped of their gloss. Water-stained gift wrap. And one sheet of pristine white letterhead, embossed with a decorative M. Found near the train station in a manila envelope, which she’s since cut open to double its surface area. The clean page, though, is kept that way. It’s too perfect, too important, for regular lists, like the one she’s amending now:
To Get
– 3-4 chairs
– 3 cups, saucers (more for guests?)
– 2 more plates
– 3 sets of cutlery
– Gold frame from Neuemarkethub (Ned)
– Shower vouchers (extras for May)
– A Gran and a few more cousins
Thinking, she lifts her hat, tangles words and knots in her hair. She chews the end of her pencil stub, then adds:
– Mirror
Once the first list is ready to go, she adds a couple more question marks beneath the one titled To Sell before picking up another, scribbled on a lined piece of paper, torn from a pocket-sized notebook. For a while, she’d kept this one memorised. Whenever a new idea struck her, she’d add it to the lot, watch the contents run through her ’wind, over and over and over. But after a few weeks, she knew she was forgetting things. One by one, older thoughts dropped off—she felt their absence in the pit of her stomach, but could do nothing to dredge them up again. So she started writing her thoughts in secret, waiting to share them with Peyt. Stockpiling a rats’ nest of tidings, fears, intimacies. She scribbles forgot your jacket, then tucks this note into her coat with the others. Then she turns to her manila masterpiece, and plans her route for today.
The map is far from complete, but she’s made a decent start. On rough pages she sketches the neighbourhood around her apartment—the toilet block, apartments around the cobbled square, the grocer’s, the widening streets—then copies them, makes maps of the maps, stars her favourite rummages, exes cannons and guns, shades boroughs fallen to the greys. At night, after shopping, she corrects the drafts. Erases more than she adds.
Lament for the Afterlife Page 24
