MaddAddam 03 - MaddAddam

by Margaret Atwood

  I think that’s enough of the story of Zeb for tonight. Look, the moon is rising. It’s your bedtime.

  I know you don’t have beds. But I have a bed. So it is my bedtime now. Good night.

  Good night means that I hope you will sleep well, and wake up safely in the morning, and that nothing bad will happen to you.

  Well, such as … I can’t think what sort of bad things might happen to you.

  Good night.

  Scars

  Scars

  She’s tried to be discreet, sneaking off alone every night after she’s told the Crakers their story, then joining Zeb once out of eyesight. But she’s not fooling anyone, or anyone among the humans.

  Naturally, they see it as funny. Or the younger ones do – Swift Fox, Lotis Blue, Croze and Shackie, Zunzuncito. Even Ren, probably. Even Amanda. Romance among the chronologically challenged is giggle fodder. For the youthful, lovelorn and wrinkly don’t blend, or not without farce. There’s a moment past which the luscious and melting becomes the crusty and wizened, the fertile sea becomes the barren sand, and they must feel she’s passed that moment. Brewing herbs, gathering mushrooms, applying maggots, tending bees, removing warts – beldam’s roles. Those are her proper vocations.

  As for Zeb, he’s probably less comic to them than puzzling. From their socio-bio vantage point, he should be doing what alpha males do best: jumping the swooning nubiles that are his by right, knocking them up, passing his genes along via females who can actually parturiate, unlike her. So why is he wasting his precious sperm packet? they must wonder. Instead of, for instance, investing it wisely in the ovarian offerings of Swift Fox. Which is almost certainly that girl’s take on things, judging from the body language: the eyelash play, the tit thrusts, the hair-tuft flinging, the armpit display. She might as well be flashing a blue bottom, like the Crakers. Baboons in spate.

  Stop that, Toby, she tells herself. This is how it starts, among the closed circles of the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged: jealousy, dissention, a breach in the groupthink walls. Then the entry of the foe, the murderer, the shadow slipping in through the door we forgot to lock because we were distracted by our darker selves: nursing our minor hatreds, indulging our petty resentments, yelling at one another, tossing the crockery.

  Beleaguered groups are prone to such festering: such backbiting, such infighting. At the Gardeners, they’d held Deep Mindfulness sessions about this very subject.

  Ever since they’ve been lovers, Toby has been dreaming that Zeb is gone. In real life he is in fact gone while she dreams, as there isn’t enough room for both of them on Toby’s single-bed-sized slab in her broom closet of a room. So in the middle of each night Zeb sneaks off like someone in an ancient English country-house farce, groping in the darkness back to his own cramped cubicle.

  But in the dreams he really is gone – gone far away, nobody knows where – and Toby is standing outside the cobb-house fence, looking down the road, now overgrown with kudzu vines and choked with parts of broken houses and smashed-up vehicles. There’s a soft bleating sound, or is it weeping? “He won’t be back,” says a watercolour voice. “He won’t ever be back.”

  It’s a woman’s voice: is it Ren, is it Amanda, is it Toby herself? The scenario is sweetly sentimental, like a pastel greeting card – awake, she’d be annoyed by it, but in dreams there is no irony. She cries so much that her clothes are damp with tears, luminous tears that flicker like blue-green gasfire in what is now becoming the darkness, or is she in a cave? But then a large cat-like animal comes to console her. It rubs up against her, purring like the wind.

  She wakes to find a small Craker boy in the room with her. He’s lifted the edge of the damp sheet that entwists her and is gently stroking her leg. He smells of oranges, and of something else. Citrus air freshener. They all smell like this, but the young ones more.

  “What are you doing?” she asks as calmly as she can. My toenails are so dirty, she thinks. Dirty and jagged. Nail scissors: put them on the gleaning list. Her skin is coarse beside the pristine skin on the hand of this child. Is he glowing from within, or is his skin so fine-grained it reflects the light?

  “Oh Toby, you have legs underneath,” says the boy. “Like us.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I do.”

  “Do you have breasts, Oh Toby?”

  “Yes, I have those as well,” she says, smiling.

  “Are there two? Two breasts?”

  “Yes,” she says, resisting the urge to add, “so far.” Is he expecting one breast, or three, or maybe four or six, like a dog? Has he ever seen a dog up close?

  “Will a baby come out from between your legs, Oh Toby? After you turn blue?”

  What is he asking? Whether non-Craker people like her can have babies, or whether she herself might have one? “If I were younger, then a baby might come out,” she says. “But not now.” Though her age isn’t the deciding factor. If her whole life had been different. If she hadn’t needed the money. If she’d lived in another universe.

  “Oh Toby,” says the Craker boy, “what sickness do you have? Are you hurt?” He puts up his beautiful arms to hug her. Are those tears in his strange green eyes?

  “It’s all right,” she says. “I’m not hurt any more.” She’d sold some of her eggs to pay the rent, back in her pleebland days, before the God’s Gardeners had taken her in. There’d been infection: all her future children, precluded. Surely she’d buried that particular sadness many years ago. If not, she ought to bury it. In view of the total situation – the situation of what used to be thought of as the human race – such emotions ought to be dismissed as meaningless.

  She’s about to add, “I have scars, inside me,” but she stops herself. What is a scar, Oh Toby? That would be the next question. Then she’d have to explain what a scar is. A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What is writing, Oh Toby? Writing is when you make marks on a piece of paper – on a stone – on a flat surface, like the sand on the beach, and each of the marks means a sound, and the sounds joined together mean a word, and the words joined together mean … How do you make this writing, Oh Toby? You make it with a keyboard, or no – once you made it with a pen or a pencil, a pencil is a … Or you make it with a stick. Oh Toby, I do not understand. You make a mark with a stick on your skin, you cut your skin open and then it is a scar, and that scar turns into a voice? It speaks, it tells us things? Oh Toby, can we hear what the scar says? Show us how to make these scars that talk!

  No, she should stay away from the whole scar business. Otherwise she might inspire the Crakers to start carving themselves up to see if they can let out the voices.

  “What’s your name?” she says to the little boy.

  “My name is Blackbeard,” says the child gravely. Blackbeard, the notorious murdering pirate? This sweet child? A child who will never have a beard when he grows up because Crake did away with body hair in his new species. A lot of the Crakers have odd names. According to Zeb, Crake named them – Crake, with his warped sense of humour. Though why shouldn’t their names be odd, to go with their general oddity?

  “I am very happy to meet you, Oh Blackbeard,” she says.

  “Do you eat your droppings, Oh Toby?” says Blackbeard. “As we do? To digest our leaves better?”

  What droppings? Edible poo? No one warned her about this! “It is time to go and see your mother, Oh Blackbeard,” says Toby. “She must be worried about you.”

  “No, Oh Toby. She knows I am with you. She says you are good and kind.” He smiles, showing perfect little teeth: enchantment. They are all so attractive – like airbrushed cosmetic ads. “You are good like Crake. You are kind like Oryx. Do you have wings, Oh Toby?” He cranes his neck, trying to see behind her. Maybe the earlier hug was only a stealthy way of feeling her back for the feathered stubs that might be sprouting there.

  “No,” says Toby. “No wings.”

  “I will m
ate with you when I am bigger,” says Blackbeard. He offers this heroically. “Even if you are … even if you are only a little blue. Then you will have a baby! It will grow in your bone cave! You will be happy!”

  Only a little blue. It must mean that he recognizes her comparative age, though old is not something the Crakers have a word for. “Thank you, Oh Blackbeard,” says Toby. “Now run along. I have to eat my breakfast. And I must go and visit Jimmy – I must visit Snowman-the-Jimmy, to see if his sickness is better.” She sits up and plants her feet squarely on the floor, a sign for the boy to leave.

  Though not a sign he understands. “What is breakfast, Oh Toby?” he says. She forgot: these people don’t have meals as such. They graze, like herbivores.

  He eyes her binoculars, pokes her stack of bedsheets. Now he’s stroking her rifle, where it stands in the corner. It’s something a normal human child might do: idle fiddling, curious handling. “Is this your breakfast?”

  “Don’t touch that,” she says a little sharply. “That is not breakfast, that is a special thing for … Breakfast is what we eat in the morning – the people like me, with extra skins.”

  “Is it a fish?” says the boy. “This breakfast?”

  “Sometimes,” says Toby. “But for breakfast today, I will eat part of an animal. An animal with fur. Perhaps I will eat its leg. There will be a smelly bone inside. You wouldn’t want to see such a smelly bone, would you?” she says. That will surely get rid of him.

  “No,” says the child dubiously. He wrinkles his nose. He seems intrigued, however: who wouldn’t want to peek from behind the curtain at the trolls’ revolting feasts?

  “Then you should go away,” says Toby.

  Still he lingers. “Snowman-the-Jimmy says the bad people in the chaos ate the Children of Oryx,” he says. “They killed them and killed them, and ate them and ate them. They were always eating them.”

  “Yes, they were,” says Toby, “but they were eating them in the wrong way.”

  “Were the two bad men eating them in the wrong way too? The ones who ran away?”

  “Yes,” says Toby. “They were.”

  “How are you eating them, Oh Toby? The legs of the Children?” His huge eyes are fixed on her as if she’s about to sprout fangs and pounce on him.

  “The right way,” she says, hoping he won’t ask what the right way is.

  “I saw a smelly bone. It was behind the kitchen. Is it breakfast? Do the bad men eat such bones?” says Blackbeard.

  “Yes,” says Toby. “But they do other bad things too. Many bad things. Much worse things. We must all be very careful, and not go into the forest by ourselves. If you see those bad men or anyone like them, you must come and tell me right away. Or tell Crozier, or Rebecca, or Ren, or Ivory Bill. Any of us.” She’s gone over this point several times with all of the Crakers, the adults too, but she’s not sure they’ve taken it in. They gaze at her and nod, chewing slowly as if thinking, but they don’t seem frightened. It’s worrying, their lack of fear.

  “Not Snowman-the-Jimmy or Amanda,” the boy says. “We can’t tell them. Because they are sick.” At least he’s grasped that much. He pauses as if considering. “But Zeb will make the bad men go away. Then everything will be safe.”

  “Yes,” says Toby. “Then everything will be safe.” Already the Crakers have constructed a formidable set of beliefs about Zeb. Soon he’ll be all-potent and able to fix every ill; and that could be troublesome, because of course he can’t. Not even for me, thinks Toby.

  But the name of Zeb is reassuring to Blackbeard. He smiles again, lifts his hand, gives a little wave, like a president of old, like a queen in a cavalcade, like a movie star. Where has he picked up that gesture? Now he’s sidling backwards through the doorway. He doesn’t take his eyes off Toby until he’s around the corner.

  Did I scare him? she thinks. Will he go back to the others and tell them disgusting marvels, as real children – as children do?

  Violet Biolet

  Outside the main house the day is underway. The others must already have had their breakfasts, though Swift Fox and Ivory Bill are still at the table, engaged no doubt in some kind of arcane flirtation, she for practise, he in pathetic earnest.

  Toby looks around for Zeb, but he is nowhere to be seen; maybe he’s taking a shower. Crozier is just setting off with the Mo’Hair flock; Zunzuncito is with him, toting a spraygun, covering his back. Jimmy’s hammock is under the tree, watched over by a trio of Crakers.

  Lotis Blue and Ren are working on an addition to the cobb house. The MaddAddamites have voted to expand the number of sleeping cubicles; they’ll make the new ones roomier, more like a real house. The core structure was built as a demonstration of olden-day ways: ersatz antiquity, like a dinosaur made of cement. The Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange used to be held in this space; Toby remembers coming here with the God’s Gardeners to peddle their recycled soap and their vinegar and honey and mushrooms and rooftop vegetables, back when there had still been buying and people to buy things, selling and people to sell them.

  I ought to look around for some bees, she thinks. There must be escapees, living in the trees. It would be calming as well as useful to tend a few hives.

  The cobb-house construction has to be done in stages. This morning Ren and Lotis Blue are mixing up the mud, straw, and sand in a plastic wading pool decorated with Mickey Mice. The wood frame is in place, the layers of cobb are being added day by day. Drying each layer is a problem in view of the afternoon thunderstorms, but luckily they’ve been able to glean some plastic sheeting for coverups.

  Amanda sits near the two of them, hands in her lap, doing nothing. She does nothing a lot. Maybe it’s slow healing, Toby thinks, like slow cooking. Maybe the end result will be better that way. But at least she’s gained some weight. She has been making some effort over the past few days: pulling out a weed or two, culling the odd slug or snail. In the old Edencliff Rooftop Garden days, they’d have relocated Our Fellow Vegetable Eaters by throwing them down onto the street – slugs, too, had a right to live, went the mantra, though not in inappropriate locations such as salad bowls, where they might be harmed by chewing. But now their numbers are too overwhelming – every plant seems to generate slugs and snails as if spontaneously – so by common though unspoken agreement they’re being dropped into salt water.

  Amanda seems to enjoy that slightly, despite the writhing and frothing. But the cobb-house building work is too much for her. She used to be so strong: nothing used to frighten her. She’d been a tough pleebrat, she’d lived by her wits, she could handle anything. Of the two of them, Ren was the weaker, the more timid. Whatever has happened to Amanda – whatever was done to her by the Painballers – must have been extreme.

  Several Craker kids are watching the mud mixing. No doubt they’re asking questions. Why are you doing that? Are you making a chaos? What are those, with the round black things on their heads? What is a mickeymouse? But they do not look like mice, we have seen mice, mice do not have big white hands, and so forth. Every new thing they discover in the territory of the MaddAddamites is a source of wonder for them. Yesterday Crozier managed to glean a package of cigarettes during his shepherding stroll, and the Crakers have not got over it. He set fire to a white stick! He put it in his mouth! He breathed in the smoke! Why did you do that, Oh Crozier? Smoke is not for breathing, smoke is for cooking a fish, and so on.

  “Just tell them it’s a Crake thing,” said Toby, so Crozier did. The Crake gambit was one-size-fits-all.

  Some of the Crakers – a number of the women, several of the smaller kids – are over in the erstwhile playground outside the cobb-house boundary fence, munching away at the kudzu vines draping the swing set. Kudzu is one of their favourite plants, which shows foresight on the part of Crake because there won’t be a shortage of kudzu any time soon. They’ve got the red plastic slide almost uncovered, and the children are stroking it as if it’s alive. Who remembered the swing set was under there, before they s
tarted gnawing?

  Toby heads for the violet biolet, not only because she needs to but also because she doesn’t want to arrive at the breakfast table before Swift Fox leaves it. She consciously suppresses the word slut: a woman should not use that word about another woman, especially with no exact cause.

  Really? says her inner slut-uttering voice. You’ve seen the way she looks at Zeb. Eyelashes like Venus flytraps, and that sideways leer of the irises, like some outdated cut-rate prostibot commercial: Bacteria-Resistant Fibres, 100% Fluid-Flushing, Lifelike Moans, ClenchOMeter for Optimal Satisfaction.

  She takes a breath, calls on her Gardener meditation training. She visualizes her anger pushing out through her skin like a snail horn, then lets the small bud of fury wither and fall away. She smiles gently in the direction of Swift Fox, thinking, All you want is a quick jump, you want to snag him just to show you can. Nail him up on your trophy wall. You know nothing about him, you can’t truly value him, he isn’t yours, you don’t know how long I waited …

  Which counts for nothing. Nobody cares. There’s no fairness, there’s no ownership. She has no claims. If Zeb tumbles into bed with Swift Fox – even if he tiptoes into that bed, even if he oozes into it – what she is entitled to say about that is exactly nothing. For all she knows he’s double-dipping already, leaving her in affectionate sleepy-time mode – though maybe a little too much like best pals, with a little too much camaraderie between them, no? – but all the time secretly still hungry; then ducking outside, then inside through a different doorway to slide himself voraciously into the voracious Swift Fox.

  It doesn’t bear thinking about, so she won’t think about it. Will not think. Wills herself not.

  The violet biolets are part of the original park installation: three stalls for men, three for women. Their solar cells are still operating, running the ultraviolet LEDs and the small aerating-fan motors. As long as the biolets are still functioning, the MaddAddamites won’t have to dig outhouse pits. Luckily there’s lots of toilet paper to be gleaned in the nearby streets, as it wasn’t an item heavily looted during the pillaging phase of the plague. What would you do with a skid of toilet paper? You couldn’t get drunk on it.