by Ely, Jo;
“I wouldn’t mind,” complains Father. “But Zettie should have asked me first. I could have taken the axe to the spare chair. Busted it up into small pieces, burned it over a week.”
“No!” Zettie says. Interjecting suddenly. And then, “You gotta put it in like that. Whole. Like I did. Or it ain’t proper.”
“It ain’t proper what, Zettie?”
Zettie glances up at her sister, doesn’t answer. And then keeping her fierce, watchful gaze on the chair. On the chair and the flames.
Is the child thinking about a Sinta funeral? Zorry wonders. Burning the dead’s favourite chair is an essential part of any secret mother cupboard death rite. The chair is burned whole in the absence of a corpse (a mother cupboard’s dead body is stamped ‘property of the general’, rarely returned). But the Sinta rememberers will burn the dead’s favourite armchair, cushions, patches and all. Keep watch until it’s all gone, to make sure that only the fire, the smoke, the air, soil, wind can take the chair. Along with the scarves with curling patterns of turquoise and lapis lazuli blue, from the old times, the chipotle jars, the mother cupboard’s mortar and pestle, the dried cactus paddles, pod-like seeds, the beads and the knitting. Detritus of plant experiments, paint pots. All the possessions of the dead, built up over a thrifty lifetime, invested with the spirit of the one who touched, made, patched up and held onto them, and will never touch or hold them again.
All but the dead’s hidden books will be burned (because a book can never truly have an owner).
But so that the general and his Egg Men, Gaddys, may never confiscate, steal, or repurpose these things. Not now, and not forever.
Downbutnotout and Amen.
Zettie has only ever attended one illegal Sinta funeral, to Zorry’s certain knowledge, and that was Mamma Zeina’s funeral, six weeks ago, more. It’s inconceivable to her that the child would remember that far back now. Zorry makes the decision to approach the matter cautiously with Zettie. If she has some memory-debris then it may be a fragile thing and she mustn’t be pushed.
“Well.” Zorry says. “Well it seems funny, don’t it? It looks strange. The chair. Funny. With the flames licking around it that way.” Now Zorry looks at Zettie sideways, she examines the child. It seems impossible that the child could remember their mother. She was given an adult-sized medicine dose and she’s only four droughts old, small for her age. Zorry pauses, thinking, and then, “I wonder, Zettie. Whose chair is that now?”
“It’s the spare chair.” Their father says gruffly, from his corner. Bangs the side of his head. And then putting on his coat, as though he puts a coat on for the first time in his life. He staggers into the front room.
Zorry listens to the sound of Father, rattling open his medicine cupboard, the hinges stick and the handle’s too heavy, falls off. Zorry turns toward her small sister again. “Is it the spare chair, Zettie? Is it nobody’s chair?”
Now Zorry crouches beside Zettie. She holds the child’s gaze.
Zettie looks up at her sister for a long time and then, as though the whole of Bavarnica weighs down hard on her tiny shoulders, a heavy sigh. “You don’t know whose chair it is. Do you, Zorry?” And now Zettie, sounding almost comically like their mother, “Durn it, Child. Zorry you’ve forgot your own mother. You’d forget your own head too, your neck, elbows and arms iffen I let you. Wouldn’t cha?”
Zorry blinks and sits back on her heels.
“Yes. Zettie. That there is Mamma Ezray’s chair.” And then, “But … you took the meds. You took the meds and …” Checks Zettie’s arms, and then, lifting the child’s matted hair, her ears and the back of her neck. “You’re not greened.”
“Quit poking me about.”
“You’ve no green on you. How did you … do that?” Zorry stares hard at the child. “I’ll fetch Jengi.” She says.
Soft sucking sound of the newly mended front door as Zorry almost pulls it out of its hinges. Clanking sound as she forces it back into its too-small frame. Zettie turns away from the fire and she looks at the door Zorry closed behind her. The child watches the door for a long time, listening to the pat, crunch, lollop, sliding rhythms of her sister’s running feet on the rockoned path out front of the cottage. Zettie goes on listening until she can’t hear Zorry’s feet anymore.
She turns back toward the fire.
Mamma’s chair is slumped against the inner sides of the fireplace. Smoke rises from the patchwork cushions. The logs Zettie used were damp and the fire is going out.
“I knewn it.” She says. And her small hands curling and uncurling. “You caint have a funeral iffen you ain’t dead. It won’t take.”
Jengi pops his head around the door. “I heard you were holding a real Sinta funeral, Zettie.”
Zettie looks down. Scowls.
It occurs to Jengi for the first time that if the child remembers her mother then she might also remember his own good self, pinning her down by the elbow, not letting her cry out or go to her mother, the guards. The child might very well blame him for what she saw in her yard.
“Is she a hidden rememberer? A rememberer hiding out in plain sight? Ungreened?” Zorry asks Jengi. Jengi meets Zettie’s eye. “Aye. That’s what it looks like. There have been a handful lately, on the Sinta farmsteads. Most of the hidden rememberers are … children.”
Jengi seems to read Zorry then. “Now, don’t start hoping, Zorry. You Sintas and your bloody hope, it’s most likely just … They’re having remnant memories, Zorry. It might all be gone by morning.” Jengi says, his eye caught by the child’s small hands closed into two fists, her small brow furrowing. He decides to softly provoke Zettie, hoping Zettie will reveal what she knows, “The child’s memory is a flash in the pan. Nope.” He says. “I don’t reckon this child remembers her mother, not really.” Jengi eyes Zettie curiously. To see how she takes this.
Zettie scowls again, and then … Something seems to happen. She starts singing. Babyish made-up words, but it’s not the rhythm or the intonation of a Sinta funeral dirge. It’s one of Mamma Ezray’s nursery rhymes.
“You’re singing, Zettie?” Aunt appears around the kitchen door, roiling at a tin cup with a dark red cloth. A smile spreading across her tired face.
“It’s the first time the little one has said a word in weeks.” And then, when Zettie’s sing-song rhyme is finished, “Zettie, you will never guess where I found this hen’s egg?” Aunt pulls the egg out of her apron pocket to show Zettie. “Reckon the hens were trying to save it for you. Go on. Try to guess where it was.”
Zettie seems to withdraw into herself.
Aunt peers at her. “Now then. Now. Why is she upset?” She looks up, seems to look at Jengi properly for the first time. “What did you do? What did you say to her?” And then, her voice softer now, looking down at the chair, at the fire, at the child’s glittering eyes and her strange expression. She thinks about the nursery rhyme. “Oh …” It seems to come to her. “She remembers?” And at first it’s a relief. Soft laughter. And then, “Oh …” She says again. “She remembers …” Aunt looks down at the child. Locks her in a slow gaze.
Now tears are glistening on both Zettie’s cheeks. By the firelight, Zettie’s tears seems to Jengi like liquid gold. Surely, he thinks, this proves that the general’s labs have been infiltrated? That Mamma Zeina’s gathering is coming closer. Jengi blinks. The light shifts. Zettie is covered in snot and tears, the child is howling like an animal in pain.
Zorry tries to scoop Zettie into her arms, but their father strides out of the kitchen, stops her, roughly. “Don’t you touch her. You’ve done enough. You and him.” Father grimaces at Jengi.
“Get out of my house.” He says. “Never come here again.” Her father delivers these words calmly. This is so Zorry will understand he’s for real.
Zorry stands up slowly to go. Her eyes travel over Zettie and her aunt. She nods curtly at her father.
“Come on Zorry,” Jengi says. Holding his arm out. “We are doing no good here.”
> At the newly-mended front door, Zorry turns around once. Gazes at the cooling fireplace.
The last dipping flames curl around the rusted nails, the hinges of the leaning, singed chair. Everything seems to glow.
“Watch them sparks, Zettie,” Zorry’s parting words to Zettie. And now Aunt nods, pulls Zettie back and buries her face in the back of her neck. “You’re too close to the fire, Zettie.” She says.
That night, Zettie dreams. Her mother’s chair is burning and the fire builds high and frightening until, just when the fireplace can barely contain it, then the chair gets smaller. Slumps and shrinks into itself. And then it’s all gone. Zettie thinks. The chair. The fire. The rising. Blink. And now the fire is licking out of the fireplace, curling into the room.
The child wakes up howling.
Aunt is with the hens in the yard, out of ear-shot. In a bit, Zettie wipes her face with her sleeve. She thinks of something. When the ashes cool, Zettie says to herself. When the ashes cool down … I’m going to find them chair nails. She plans ahead to sift the ashes for them later, when Father goes out for his next work rota, and whilst Aunt is in the allotment tending the roots.
Nails and screws from a chair can be right useful, Zettie thinks. Useful. In one way or another. She eases her feet down the bedside, splaying her small toes ready to meet the cold tiles. She pads over toward her bedroom window. She looks out.
Mamma said she would come to the fence.
Zettie looks out of her window for a long time, and then, “Mamma aint a liar.” She says to herself. “That funeral didn’t take. And Mamma said she will come.”
THE GRAIN QUEUE
SINCE THE NIGHT OF the fire and the chair, something seems to have been released in Zettie. All the leftovers that no-one else can see a job for, Zettie finds. Together them throwaway things can be more, Zettie knows that. Wind worn glass shards. Bones of a cat. Grind ‘em. The dried out skin shed by a lizard. Burnt things. Bloodied stones. All these things can make paint. The way Mamma Ezray used to make paint. Only Zettie thinks of things Mamma Ezray hadn’t thought of.
She considers the nails and screws in the burnt up chair. Pulls them out of the cold ashes. With a thing like that Zettie can build something that stands, or something that can be fixed high and is hard for the Egg Men to take down, giving folks a chance to take a sideways look at it. Soon everyone will know what Zettie knows, that’s the plan. They will know the new lizard’s safe to eat. And that’s when Mamma will come home. The thing has become very clear to Zettie.
Before sun up, Zettie is chalking lizards on the busted-in doors of the Sinta cottages. She’s scratching lizards into the sides of broken bricks and on to the rubble of the tumbledown Sinta allotment buildings, mud daubed lizards along the tree trunks and low branches in the long copse which runs along the back of the cottages.
The child’s gone mad, an effect of her medication, is the general feeling in the Sinta households, as they scrub off the chalk swirling tails and chalk scales, the wide chalky eyes of the eating lizards. Mamma Ezray’s lost youngest child has gotten their attention.
The sign takes a long time to finish carving with the small kitchen knife and, when it’s done, then it’s heavy to drag to the village centre, and much too heavy to climb the side of the village shop with. Also Zettie has a slight loss of nerve, looking up. In the end she leaves it tipped up against the side of the wall, in the dark alleyway beside the shop. But by sundown, Zettie has made around forty-seven small lizard drawings beside the grain queue, outside the shop. Nobody notices anything at first, just a small bent-over child, by the queue. Scribbling in the dirt with a stick.
“Sand paintings, Zettie? Have a slurp of rainwater from my flask, Zettie.”
“The poor child. Are you lost? I’ve got some crumbs in my apron pocket.”
“Oh wait, me too. Here, have these, Zettie. To keep you going, that looks like hard work.”
By the time Zettie gets to the last lizard, then she’s had a little practise. This one is the best one, she thinks. Staring hard at a wide eyed infant, peering at her over his mother’s shoulder. And then she takes a small twig out of her apron pocket, sharpens one end. Plants the pointed end of the stick in the hard sandy ground outside the shop. Leaf for a flag, to warn folks it’s there.
The leaf flag is soon ripped, the sharpened stick twisted and bent. Zettie’s last lizard sand painting has been trodden in by one hundred Sinta mothers and their offspring and the feet of more than a thousand edge farm fathers, all jostling and irritable with hunger in the grain queue.
The grain queue dwindles as the general’s curfew approaches. The dark seems to come down around Zettie softly.
Zettie is gazing down at the ground where her flag stood. And then looking up toward the shop. Brief shrewd stare at Gaddys, staring blindly out from behind her counter.
And then pushing out her small chin, Zettie pops her thumb in her mouth.
I need paint, she thinks. Eyeing Gaddys’ coiled hair. Paint. And I need something good to paint on. Zettie looks down at her skin. And then she knows it, knows it suddenly. Zettie knows what to do.
Zettie runs home as fast as her small legs will take her.
Gaddys watches, nodding slowly. The child seems to her to be fleeing. Well, that’s a good start. Gaddys smiles.
It’s time to get ready, Zettie thinks, running. Ready for Mamma. Trees and shrubs are whizzing past her. She’s making tiny footprints in the dust road all the way home.
Mamma will be pleased when things are … Ready. She thinks. Mamma will see and know, Zettie tells herself. Zettie has not dared to go back to the fence since that night. But every night when the child dreams, Mamma is there. She is waiting for Zettie to be brave enough, good enough, to come, Zettie thinks. And then seeing Mamma Ezray, in her mind’s eye. The cobweb thin white fence to the killing forest pulses and undulates behind her.
When Zettie reaches the stone wall outside her cottage, she stops. And then, to avoid her father and aunt, Zettie slips around it and into the shed at the back. Mamma Ezray’s paint pots are still there, untouched since she left.
A strange feeling of delight is growing in Zettie, looking around at the paints. Mamma Ezray did not normally allow Zettie near her precious paints, except under careful instruction, when she might allow Zettie to mix some herself. Zettie’s forgotten Mamma Ezray’s training, of course (Mamma Ezray herself was trained by her father, the mapmaker). I can’t remember, Zettie thinks. Skewering open a lid, finding the paint pot empty. Then again, some of the work is instinctive.
Red earth, mixed with a little moisture from the rain barrel, makes orange. The rows of leaf stems and the sap from the vines that creep around the back of the cottage, drape themselves over the shed roof like basking snakes, they make a blue-tinged dark green. As it turns out. There is some dried up, turquoise coloured paint at the edge of one pot lid, and on the ridged underside of another one, pink. The kind, Mamma used to say, that makes you think of seashells. Zettie has never seen a seashell. But on the back of her hand there is a deep, bright blue colour, when she looks. It’s softly mottled with black. She must have picked it up by accident, messing with the pots.
The more that she explores, the more colours she makes.
Next morning, Zettie finds her way into the shed before sun up, when the air’s still moist and cool and the hens are clucking sleepily in the henhouse. Zettie paints the scales first, arms and legs. She has no mirror, so her face is harder, must be painted by feel. When she’s done with the scales, eyes and nostrils, more or less replicating the species colour of the lizard, she goes back and with a chunk of coal makes smudged black lines and circles, to indicate the special markings of the new lizard. The eating lizard. Zettie’s feet seem to make their own way back toward the grain queue. Zettie looks down at them often, blue and green and grey, strange. She doesn’t feel like herself.
“Wow! What are you doing, Child?”
“Eating lizard.” She explains. Popping her t
humb out and then in.
“Ah, Zorry. Lizards won’t eat you. Don’t be afraid of them little lizards.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Oh she’s thinking about them killing forest lizards. I’ve reassured her. Mad little thing. Motherless thing.”
“Oh those. Reckon they’s pizen Zettie. Don’t be touching those things, Zettie.”
Zettie watches as the queue moves away. She feels her mother getting farther from her. It’s a rising feeling of panic. Now Zettie moves to the front of the queue, blocks the door to the shop with her tiny body. And then lays down across the door jamb. Holds up the line. The villagers begin to step over the child.
“We get it, Zettie.” An old edge farmer says, leaning over, scratches his ancient ear. Taps the side of his round nose. “Eating lizards. Spread the word, eh? Got it.” Tugs his long silver-black straggled beard. Zettie sits up. She looks dangerously pleased and the old man glances briefly at Gaddys, gets up, wincing, from his crouched position. “Ancient knees,” he says, making a distracting show of tipping sideways, leaning on the shelves. And then looking at Gaddys squarely, “I gave her a sweet. Guess she’s crazy happy about that.” Someone hisses at Zettie to scram. She doesn’t see who it is.
“Do not feed that lizard child again.” Gaddys stares the old man down.
There are whispers running up and down the grain queue all day.
CRACKDOWN
THERE WAS A BOMB last night. At sun-up Antek was one of those called up for rubble clearing duty.
“Foreign bomb.” The tannoy said, on repeat. Its high pitched reproachful tone rising up over the barracks.
It’s unusual to have a drone attack at the heart of the OneFolks’ village but not unheard of. Whoever sent it apparently didn’t know Bavarnica too well, and the officers’ barracks even less well, Antek notes. The prisoners’ wing was the most badly hit, and the side of batch forty seven’s barracks a steaming pile of rubble and metal. The torn sides of the main building like a dollhouse. Meantime the batch 46 guards somehow had enough time to entomb themselves inside the steel bomb shelters. The general’s top officers in their reinforced towers remained completely untouched by the blast.
