by Ely, Jo;
“You can beat the reboot?”
“Yes.” She says. “Sometimes.” She eyes the scar on his chin.
Antek takes a step back, makes a shrewd appraisal of the room. Letters are banned but Antek’s mother has been inventive at leaving herself signs and notices of all kinds that something was being lost. Something or someone. Taps the side of her nose. “I have found ways,” she says. Cackling, and then falling silent. As though she forgets again. And now pressing the spoon into the tassels of the embroidered scarf around her neck, so that the spoon is hidden underneath the tassels. “I have ways to remember my sons.” She says. “I take back what I can.”
Her eyes glisten.
And now if you blinked then you’d think you imagined the thing, Antek thinks, as once more his mother’s face takes on that lost, absent expression of the recently rebooted. Another shiver starts in her shoulders and then running down over her body, like a small wave or as though a seam of electrical points attached to the surface of her skin are triggered, one by one. She drops the spoon when the sting of it reaches her wrist.
Antek doesn’t pick the spoon up, not right away. Spins gently on his heels. It’s as though the scene springs into life: he can see that the house is a body of signs, mementoes. Many of which he guesses that his mother can no longer decipher since her reboot, but leave her with only the vague sense of a disjuncture in the normal lay out of a room: a picture askew, the three lampshades in a row, heads bowed like three huge feeding birds, to remind her there should be three of us, mother, father and son. A sideboard cabinet pulled out, so that the sharp jut hits your hip as you pass the lampshades, as if to say ‘Take notice. Something is changed.’
Not so much a reminder of what’s lost, most of it, Antek thinks, fingering the scar on his chin, not so much a reminder of who is lost as a reminder that someone was.
“Snake.” She says. Eyeing the back of Antek’s head.
It’s what she always says. Antek used to wonder if she meant him or maybe his stain, which can look a little scaly sometimes. And silver in the dim light of the living room. But something makes Antek look toward the vent, a moment later a small sound catches his attention. He listens.
“Snake in the vents of the house.” She says. “They put it there to control me. The day you were stained, it came. Snake in the vents of a house not to control me …” she says. “But to get me to control myself around you, Antek. Not talk too much. The latest batch is always precious to the general.” She smiles. Eyes the vents. “What they don’t know because they never checked is … I ain’t afeared of snakes.” She smiles. Hugs herself.
Antek sighs. “And your son is a spoon.” He turns toward his mother. Now Antek watches as his mother’s grin spreads out slowly across her features, wrinkles her nose and the soft lines around her eyes. Blink and blink, and the colour of her eyes returns to normal. It’s like a break in the cloud, a sudden and unfathomable joy, to have her fully return from the reboot. The warmth of it spreads through Antek.
There is a glimmer of light filtering in through the dusty curtains and the fern over the fireplace softly uncurls. This seems to release something in Antek’s mother. “We take back what we can, Antek.” Taps the side of her head. “They won’t get it all, Antek.” His mother seems to take some delight in repeating his name.
They hear the snake bumping hard against the side of the vents. Rattles its tail. As though it senses the change in the room’s atmosphere. Mother gazes in the direction of the vent, the snake.
“It’s terrified,” she says. “I can’t see what it sees. The poor thing, but it’s trapped. Like me. It belongs in the killing forest with the other fearful things.” She says.
“That snake is big, Mother. It would happily eat you.”
She smiles at her son. “Of course, of course. Well, it is a snake after all. T’aint nothing personal.” She shrugs, as though unconcerned. “Speaking of snakes, where did that durned Egg Man get to …?” She stares at the front door for so long that she seems to forget again. She settles down in her chair.
Crunch and slide, Antek hears his father trudging slowly, heavily, down the gravel path toward the farmhouse. When the front door slams open, it hits the wall fast, bounces back and is caught by Antek’s father’s stiff right hand. Must have hurt his fingers, Antek thinks. He notices that his father doesn’t react.
Father appears not to see his wife and son right away, “This room is a tip,” he says. And then eyeing the rearranged lamps, the crookedly placed sideboard. Looking shrewdly at his wife, who leans and slumps in her chair. He crosses the room then. Sitting down heavily in the chair by the kitchen window. He looks out. Antek looks in the direction that his father’s looking.
Beyond the kitchen window, Antek’s father has a clear view of the slowly greening Sinta cottage next door. Zorry’s cottage. He seems to rearrange his chair now, the better to see. Now Antek and his father watch as Jengi slips out from beyond the henhouse at the back of the Sinta cottage, crosses the dusty yard with his loping step. Three strides, he takes. Just to reach Zorry’s back door.
“Some strange comings and goings, to be sure.” Father says. Grunts. And now Antek catches sight of Mamma Ezray briefly, at the left, upstairs window. And then again at her kitchen window, only moments later. She is drawing all the curtains and blinds, although it’s several moments before curfew and the whistle hasn’t even sounded yet.
Antek’s father goes on looking at the Sinta cottage for a long time. And now Antek looks too. Tries to see what his father sees there.
“Like a house in a dream, the moss covered cottage.” Antek’s father says. It’s a strange and surprising statement, coming from Father. And after it, there’s a long, strained silence in the kitchen. Antek waits for his father to speak again, but he seems to have said all that he plans to.
Once more there’s the sound of heavy boots in the gravel outside. Voices. Antek turns toward his father’s chair. Empty. Shape of his father’ behind has slow-worn grooves in the wood. His father, having moved silently and fast across the room, is now opening the front door with some gusto. Greets his men.
Antek recognises the two soldiers only slightly. The larger Egg Man, on the left, is from batch 46, fully stained just like Antek’s father, and with the same huge skull which is the most distinctive feature of his unit. The man on the right is different. Judging by his physical appearance he’s a batch 47 Egg Boy. Antek believes he’s never seen this one before, noting that the boy looks jittery and confused, so it seems likely that he’s recently received his last stain. The Egg Boy has luminous red hair, freckled skin running down to his collar bone. Wide amazed eyes. It’s a warning.
Antek notices that his mother has begun rocking her chair, rhythmically behind him. Her rocking motions begin slowly. Getting gently faster.
Antek doesn’t have a choice about the last staining, as it turns out. He’s taken to the labs by force. Father’s hand is clapped over his mouth as he heaves him over the door jamb toward the waiting van.
Antek’s mother rocks her chair in crazy rhythms now, urgent, fast and getting faster, until it seems to her son as though she’ll be flung from her chair by the motion. Antek’s father deposits his son in the large boot of the van, locks the door and then marches tight-lipped back to the house. He gives his wife a brief and furious stare, “You see what you did, Woman?” He opens his mouth wide, showing all his sharpened steel-capped teeth. “I had to force him to go. How does that help?”
And then raising his bitten hand to show her. “The boy bit me!”
She goes on rocking her chair back and forth, back and forth. More steadily now, but the motions still in that urgent manner. She is staring straight ahead. Antek’s father explodes,
“You see what you did?” He screams. “Now the boy don’t want his stain! Do you imagine for one moment, Woman, that any of this helps him? DO YOU WANT THIS SON TO BE CANCELLED TOO?” He stops, panting. Lowers his voice and spits the last words. “Along with eve
ry other Antek there’s ever been.”
The snake is rattling furiously through the vents now, circles the house, bangs the tinny sides of its cage, bumps the vents and flickering its huge tongue in and out of every corner. Now Antek’s mother lets her eyes wander from her husband’s feet to his face. She seems to see her husband standing, boots planted either side of the doorway, face turning puce and the huge stems at his neck expanding. It’s a vision that would terrify most people in Bavarnica, but she closes her eyes and the ghost of a smile. Eyeballs seem to roll back in her head.
And now the life seems to go out of Antek’s father. It’s sudden.
“The boy doesn’t want to be an Egg Man!” He slumps against the door frame. And then quieter still, “Doesn’t want to be an Egg Man like me.”
She stops rocking. She blinks and opens her eyes. Remains perfectly still.
Jengi, underneath the window ledge out back of the house, softly slides out and into the shadow to one side of the cowshed. He arches and stretches his limbs.
Makes his way toward the long copse out back.
PIZEN
ZORRY’S COTTAGE IS NEXT door to Antek’s farmhouse. A soft landslide had left the Sintas’ cottage buckling to the left, and now it was as though it tipped its hat to the steel trap egg farmhouse next door, with its razor sharp glinting fences. The cottage took a bow or stumbled, somehow couldn’t get up.
A creeping moss grows over the most broken down parts of the cottage and from a distance it looks as though the whole building’s growing haphazardly out of the soil.
Zorry’s mind moves slowly today. She hasn’t eaten in twenty-seven hours.
“You hungry?”
“Yes, Mamma,” Zorry says quietly.
“Nothing to spare in the general’s kitchen?”
“Nothing today.” Small pause and then, “The Egg Men have started throwing the leftovers into the moat.”
Mamma Ezray’s shoulders droop. She looks down at her work.
“Aye. They’re only following orders.”
“Following orders, eh? Well … I wouldn’t mind so much, Zorry says. “Only they killed the critters first.” She looks up, checks her mother’s face for understanding. “Killed them for waste, Mamma.”
Mamma Ezray doesn’t seem to hear her daughter. She is grinding something green with her stone mortar and wooden pestle.
Zorry untangles herself from her apron. “Did it right in front of the half-starved kitchen workers too. Were they orders too? Seemed spiteful to me.” Now Zorry eyes the Egg Man’s farmhouse through the kitchen window. Rubs the back of her hand against her left cheek. She shivers suddenly.
“Cold?” Mamma Ezray looks up. “Night’s falling. Shut the windows, Zorry.”
Zorry doesn’t move. “I heard they’ll start burning their food leftovers from tomorrow. Destroy what they don’t need.” Mamma Ezray’s face takes on a strange, amazed look. Eyes widen. “The general’s moat has its own ecosystem nowadays. I don’t think anybody planned that.” Twists at one long dusty grey curl, lets it fall across her left eye. “Now they’ll have to deal with that’un too. Diseases, vermin, all sorts. And the wild dogs that feed on the vermin, multiply, some of them have rabies. Imagine that? Rabies in the general’s show village. An ancient disease.”
Ezray sighs. “Sometimes … Sometimes Zorry I do wonder if they’re even quite right in the head. The OneFolks.” She gazes at her elder daughter.
The green substance at the curved round end of Mamma Ezray’s wooden pestle is just a little off somehow. She can’t say exactly what’s wrong with it, but she knows something is. Tipping her head slightly toward it, sniffs. And then sticks out the tip of her tongue.
Something is stopping Mamma Ezray from testing this plant. She can’t say what is yet. Sometimes these intuitions can be important, but she’s not sure if this one is. Or whether she’s just been rattled by Zorry’s kitchen tales from the general’s house. Ezray pokes her tongue out again, toward the soft green substance.
Zorry eyes her mother. “Don’t. It looks like pizen, Mamma.”
Zorry’s hungry stomach groans and the rumbling growl goes on for several seconds. This seems to steel Mamma Ezray.
“Only one way to find out.” Mamma Ezray forces herself to taste her new plant, grimaces at the first lick. Spits it up. “Sorry. Not this one. Not for eating anyway.” She screws up her face, dabs the end of her tongue with her apron.
And then, “But I’ve not seen nothing quite like this plant here, Child.” She holds it up to show Zorry. “I found it last night, growing right at the edge of the forest’s mouth. Like the killing forest spat out a tooth, just for me.” She smiles. Stares at the green paste still clinging to the end of the pestle, and then down at the softly wriggling root of the plant, pinned down by a small arrow head to the right.
“You going to grind that one?”
The plant seems to wriggle harder against the arrow head. Mamma Ezray eyes it. “I reckon not.” She says.
There is a quivering leaf on a separate tray beside the long root, and the two parts of the plant seem to be trying to rejoin.
“What’s that mottling on it? Disease?”
Mamma Ezray does not seem to hear Zorry’s question. And muttering softly to herself now, “I just know that I can … Turn this plant.”
“The forest spat out a tooth, eh?” Zorry eyes the plant on the table. “You sure it weren’t a fang?”
Now the plant root begins rocking softly side to side.
“Not yet edible.” Mamma Ezray pronounces, watching it for a while longer. “I need more time.”
“You tried cooking it?”
Mamma Ezray rolls her eyes. “Are you aiming to teach me my business, Zorry?” Mamma Ezray is irritable with hunger.
Zorry’s shoulders droop a little. Her stomach hurts and her mind swims gently. She gets up and moves slowly across the room toward the sink. Stops and holds a kitchen chair back halfway. Mamma Ezray looks up, concerned.
They know at once, just from the quality of the door knock, that it’s Jengi outside.
“Quick, let him in,” Mamma Ezray says, getting up to close the curtains, although it’s several moments before the whistle announcing curfew will be blown. Jengi knocks again. Open palmed, and rattling at the handle.
“Come in!” Mamma Ezray’s voice carries gently. Jengi dips around the door. Soft click as it closes behind him. Jengi slides the rusting latch across. Glances through the blinds to the left of the door. “He saw me.”
“What?”
“I think he saw me. The Egg Man next door.”
“It’s fine. You have a shop delivery for us, don’t you? That’ll cover you. Something suitably spiteful from Gaddys, something that ain’t so much a gift as a threat?” She eyes him.
“I guess I might be able to think of some kind of alibis along those lines.”
“Do that.”
Mamma Ezray goes on watching Jengi, with a warm, shrewd gaze. Notices he does not meet either Zorry’s eye, or her own. He seems to always look down. Jengi takes three careful steps toward her, pulls up a chair. Mamma Ezray feels Zorry’s presence behind her now. Feels Zorry’s nail-bitten right hand on the back of her chair.
“What do you want, Jengi?” She asks.
She notices Jengi’s gaze swivel, as if by instinct, toward Zorry. “And you can take your eyes off my daughter, Jengi.” Mamma Ezray says, warm and stern as a general can be sometimes with her troops. And then folding her arms across her chest. “Do not bring trouble to my house, Jengi. This is what I have asked you in return for my work. And yet, here you are. Explain.”
The two are eye to eye, for one long moment.
Jengi shows Mamma Ezray his palms and smiles. “You and I have always seen things more or less the same way, Mamma Ezray. I came to tell you that Zorry’s mission is finished. That her work is done.”
“Good.” Mamma Ezray smiles approvingly. “Then you may have my next promising plant. To seed out by the baobab.”
“Thank you, Mamma Ezray.”
Zorry winces. Turns toward the sink, with her back toward Jengi. Zorry is silent when she’s angry. As though she mistrusts her own words. How dare they speak about her this way? As though she were a thing to be traded over. Zorry will never be owned, not even by Mamma Ezray trying to protect her. Zorry is wiping down the cutlery. Simmering quietly by the sink. As if they sense something, no-one looks at her.
Once more something on the floor seems to catch Jengi’s eye. Now mamma Ezray rustles in her apron pocket, pulling out a second plant root. “She sticks to leaves now,” Zorry says, turning at last toward Jengi. There’s an edge in her voice. “Mamma Ezray nearly died this time last year, tasting berries and the new seed, gathered from the ground around the fence to the killing forest. The same pizen berries are in season now but their appearance has changed. We have to watch out.” She checks Jengi’s face for signs of understanding.
“I’m worried Mamma Ezray’s going to catch a pizen now that she’s stepped up her work, what with Mamma Zeina gone.”
Mamma Ezray tuts, she goes on crushing the new plant root with her mortar and pestle. Jengi goes on examining the floor, as though he hasn’t even heard Zorry. At one point he finds an excuse to move his chair, examines what’s underneath its wooden limbs.
“You looking for something, Jengi?” Mamma Ezray sniffs. “I mop my floor every day, Son.”
“It’s … I’m looking for …” He looks up. Meets her eye, and then as though he catches himself, “It’s nothing.”
Mamma Ezray sniffs the mortar’s contents. She scratches an insect bite on her arm. Grinds the pestle anticlockwise.
“And what are you looking for Mamma Ezray? Are you looking for water, like Mamma Zeina was?”
Mamma Ezray gives him a bleak look. “I am looking for food for my childur. Gaddys is starving out the Sinta, at least until she gets her some information from one of us. Haven’t you heard about that, Jengi? I am looking for a plant that my family can eat.” She repeats, speaking too loudly now. Her eyes fill up with fierce tears.
