South

by Frank Owen

  The sunlight was finally creeping over the lip of that eastern hill: the line of day slid down the opposite side where it would warm the whole valley. The miracle mushrooms would keep growing sleepily in their beds in their climate-controlled conditions. Dyce’s eyes watered at the brilliance of it all. He struggled to keep up as the others trotted up the main street ahead of him.

  Ed showed off the general dealer and the saloon, the barber and the tailor, all made the way people had seen them in the old movies. Vida kept thinking that the shop fronts were facades, and if she went round the back of them she would find only the pine struts keeping them upright. But people seemed to be using them. They seemed to work in shifts in the mines, and the business of life in the upper world had to be taken care of.

  Last was the clinic. ‘This is where you’ll be, Vida.’ Ed was grinning at her, out of breath. ‘Put that medical knowledge to use.’

  ‘But if there are no viruses . . .’

  Ed laughed. ‘Oh, we aren’t perfect! Shit happens, don’t it? People still cut themselves and break their legs – or even just have headaches and toothaches. Or heart attacks, God forbid! We just need to know someone cares, don’t we, Vida? That someone’s looking out for us.’

  She smiled, though it seemed wrong when he was listing all the things that compounded suffering.

  ‘That’s what my mama always used to say.’

  45

  Vida had seen enough yawning staplers, torn folders and inkless pens in her time, and in places you’d least expect, too – the remnants of old lives removed and then abandoned to rot and rust. But each time she saw them waiting frozen and patient in their old settings, primed for their original purposes, it almost broke her heart. Now she ran her fingers over a heavy metal holepunch and turned it over in her hands. A year ago she would have sat down and made it rain confetti for an invisible wedding, just because she could. Vida punched a bunch of experimental circles out of the corner of a manila folder, but then she got to thinking that that was what a virus might look like if you magnified it enough times. She was expecting patients, but the knock on the door still came as a surprise, and Vida dropped the holepunch on her foot.

  ‘Ow. Fuck. Come in.’ It was a mistake to have replaced the door glass with hardwood, she saw now. Maybe she was losing her fighting instinct, the constant suspicion that could also save your stupid life.

  Ed stuck his head around, that ever-loving smile pasted on his cheeks like it had been stapled there. It had to be him, didn’t it?

  ‘Thought I’d give you some time to settle in. How’s it going? You ready to rock ’n’ roll, Nurse Vida?’

  He squeezed in, and Vida felt the room get warmer with his presence, as if he robbed the air of oxygen. She moved to block the confetti from him.

  ‘Born ready,’ she said, and gave him a tight little smile. She wanted to rub the bridge of her bruised foot but she didn’t want him to know she was in pain. Don’t let them see you sweat. Isn’t that what her mama always said?

  ‘Glad to hear it. Cause there are about thirty folks just itching – and I mean that – to get in here and see what you got to offer. I told them to wait in the saloon, and I’d let them know when they could come on up. Play secretary for you.’

  Ed took a seat in the chair opposite Vida and began working his shirt out of his belt.

  ‘But I figure I oughtta test-drive the vehicle, right?’

  Vida’s heart sank. Oh, God. Not a perv. She had had enough of those on the road. Their bad breath and their sad eyes.

  ‘I’ll be patient zero,’ Ed was saying, bright and desperate, as his hands worked near his crotch to free the shirt’s hem. Vida wanted to tell him that patient zero was something else altogether, and he sure as fuck did not want to be that, but she left it. Pick your battles. She really ought to get that tattooed somewhere.

  Ed’s shirt was finally untucked in front, but now he was battling to un-wedge it behind. When he’d pulled the material loose, he lifted the shirt like a sail over his head, exposing the waxy skin stretched smooth and bulbous over the rolls. The only fat man in the South. It didn’t seem to bother him.

  ‘What’s been bugging you, then?’

  ‘Well, nothing much. Just thought I’d get a check-up. See that everything’s in working order.’ He thumped his fist against his hairless chest. ‘Actually, I get a little short of breath sometimes. And I get dizzy if I stand too long.’

  Vida looked in the drawer and found a stethoscope. She polished it on her shirt and then came round to inspect him, making sure to stand behind him so he couldn’t see her face.

  ‘Just lean forward and breathe in and out, real slow.’

  His skin was damp. His middle labored against the constriction of the belt that folded his flesh. It was like examining a worm, Vida thought. She listened to the wheezing breath and the sluggish beating of his heart beneath all those layers. There was nothing, really, wrong with Ed. He was just overweight. Never tell the fat man he’s fat, she told herself. ’Specially if he’s the mayor or the king or whatever Ed is here at The Mouth. They’re all fucking terrified of him, and there must be a reason. She would have to prescribe exercise. For a man who talked up the virtues of hard work, Ed was pretty shy of it himself. He ordered the others around all day, and gorged on their produce by night. He was starting to look like a mushroom himself.

  ‘Well?’ said Ed.

  Vida didn’t know what to say. Easy does it, she thought. If you’ve ever needed to practise your pussyfooting, now is the time, little sister.

  ‘Look, it’s not something I studied, but this looks like a vascular problem. Blood flow. A quarter aspirin every morning will sort it out, if you still got. Otherwise, the usual. Try yarrow flowers in a tea.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘Yeah. Nothing to worry about.’

  Vida took the frog-cold stethoscope off and laid it on the table, then sat down again. Ed didn’t move.

  ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ She tried to make her voice soothing, the way Ruth did when she spoke to her frightened, heavy women – and her little girls: the ones who came to see her with their bellies swollen like beach balls, though they themselves still had to see fifteen candles set on their birthday cakes. They never came to her until it was too late. Denial, Vida thought. One size fits all.

  Ed smiled, lopsided, and for a moment Vida felt the pity of the thin and fit for the awkward and unwieldy.

  ‘Go on. I’m your doctor, right? Lay it out. Warts and all.’ Oh, God, no. Please don’t let it be warts. I bet that’s what it is. He’s been schtupping all the women in The Mouth, and he’s caught something nasty off of them. Or a prostate exam! He’s going to ask me to stick my finger up his ass! He wants the FULL examination, doesn’t he?

  ‘I do struggle to, ah’ – Ed made a fist and pumped the air – ‘get an erection. But only sometimes, you know. It happens to all men, right? When you’re stressed?’

  Vida didn’t blink. ‘It’s all part of the same problem. The blood flow. Take the aspirin or the yarrow and it’ll sort that right out. And, Ed?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Worrying is about the worst thing you can do.’

  ‘Okay.’ He stood and began shrugging the shirt back on, covering the pale mushroom flesh. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’ He said it quickly, his head down, as if he’d never seen a button before in his life.

  ‘No problem. I’m glad to be here.’

  And she was. She really was.

  46

  There was a hat on a hat stand behind the office door, and Vida took it now and tried it on. A game ranger’s hat, canvas, with a fake leather band that had cracked and peeled to the meshed fibers underneath. ‘You and me both, hat,’ Vida told it. It was too big, but she wore it anyway. What she really wanted was to sit back somewhere shady with her head in her mama’s lap, feeling the hair being parted and then pulled close against the scalp. It was always too tight at first, but you got used to th
e ache. It was odd not to feel it, like one of them Victorian ladies loosed from her whalebone stays.

  Now, in her oversized hat, she stepped out into the dusty high street and walked slowly down towards the trading store. There were not a lot of people around, but the ones that were all greeted Vida and she felt like tipping the hat in reply, like a new sheriff doing the rounds in a strange town. Easy, there, she thought. You’re just the nurse here, and you aren’t even on duty right now. A couple of horses were pulling a makeshift sleigh up the slope, carting splintered wood to the top fence. It made Vida as happy to see them as if they were reindeer. Horses, and mended fences. They were doing something right in The Mouth, and she was pleased to be part of it.

  The trading store door was spring-loaded, and when Vida pushed it open, it groaned and pinged like it was the only thing in the world keeping the town from being buried when the loaded shelves surrendered.

  A man was looking up at her from behind a counter. He had a watchmaker’s loupe screwed into one socket, the eye huge and watery. Cyborg, she thought.

  ‘Miss Vida,’ the man announced. He waved a pair of tiny pliers at her.

  Not cyborg. Butler.

  Vida smiled back and took her hat off, distracted by the shelves and their contents: everything you would ever need – and a bunch of things you hoped to high heaven you never would.

  ‘Thomas Pringle, at your service. Ed said you’d come by for stock.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave herself up to staring at the shelves that ran along the sides of the store, packed to their edges with old-world objects. Anything half useful was collected here, and nothing that needed a power outlet: coffee grinders; trowels; hats; vinyl records; yellow pencils; measuring tapes in inches; duct tape; duck boards; fishing tackle and lures; hosepipes and tobacco pipes; guns too; thick serrated knives and red-painted axes. And a vat that smelt a little like a pickle barrel. Mushrooms, thought Vida, and kept it to herself. I just bet that barrel is full of fucking mushrooms.

  ‘I wasn’t quite sure what you needed, so I collected all the medical things I could find. You just go through it now and take what you can use.’

  Pringle pushed a stainless steel bedpan across the counter at her. Dear Jesus, thought Vida. Please don’t ever give me cause to use that. The bedpan held box-cutters and thermometers and plastic syringes – the needles were there too, but they had seen some use already – along with heavy black thread and a rusted pair of scissors. There, Vida thought. Those might come in handy if Ed ever gets a little too frisky. Now let’s see what’s going on down below in the lower layer. She was about to put her hand in amongst the metal to turn everything over for a better look when she saw the instrument on the top shelf. It rested, dusty, above Pringle’s head, a soft machine. And it looked okay, though she was no judge. No strings and the fret pins were gone, but that wasn’t unusual, even for before. Dyce could replace those, no problem.

  ‘How much is that?’ Vida pointing to it with her chin.

  ‘Depends on what you got to trade.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s a hard one. Services, I guess?’ She added quickly, ‘Nursing services.’

  Pringle was looking at her. He smiled, the incisors yellowed as piano keys. ‘You a muso?’

  ‘Yes. Not me, no. Not for me. For my, ah, husband. Can I see it?’

  Pringle set his loupe down carefully and set up a metal step-ladder. It clanged with his progress even though his feet were small and steady. Vida could not imagine him falling.

  He handed the instrument over to her and she saw that it was a mandolin. Had been, that was. Someone had loved it and used it, and that had meant reconstituting it with bits of other instruments. Maybe this was the cyborg. The machine heads didn’t match, but they were all solid brass. Where the body had been damaged, it had been expertly merged with the convex brown of a violin. Vida shook the mandolin and it rattled. She angled it and the plectrum that had been stowed inside it fell into her palm. She held the stub of plastic to the light, hard and light as a toenail. Harper’s Guitars, it read. There was a faded phone number. Try calling that, baby, Vida told herself. See how far it gets you.

  When she was done admiring the mandolin, she gave it back to Pringle. He settled it gently on the high shelf. Once he was down again he slapped the dust out of his dark trousers and said, ‘When you got something in hand to trade, come on back and we’ll see what we can do. Got to give the town doctor a good deal. Right?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Vida. Nurse, doctor. It made no difference out here. It was the belief that counted. The will to live.

  She returned her attention to the bedpan and picked out the things she figured she could use. Then she tipped the rest out onto the wood of the counter and kept the bedpan itself.

  ‘Going to need some gardening tools too,’ she added. ‘For the herbs.’

  ‘Got to ask Ed about that first.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting. While you’re at it, ask him if music therapy counts as medicine.’

  Thomas laughed, hollow, like there was something that prevented the sound from emerging, making it echo inside him. He screwed the eyeglass back into his socket and bent over the counter.

  Vida, dismissed, grabbed her bedpan and her tools and left him in his dim store, alone with all the useful things that were left in the world.

  47

  The first day of work was tough. The news of a new doctor in town brought all the verrucas and rashes and swollen testicles to the clinic. Vida felt as if she’d spent her day looking through a medical journal of weird diseases. She’d hardly had time to check out the cubicle that had been assigned clinic status. It looked clean enough, and she’d keep it that way.

  Vida had no idea how to treat most of them, but she backed up and thought about her mother, muttering, ‘What would Ruth do?’ when it got heavy.

  And what Ruth would do was listen real hard to what the person was saying, look at them properly too, so that the things that were going on in the mind and the heart of the person in front of her found their ways into their treatment. Ruth always told Vida that most of what made people hurt on the outside came from the hurt on the inside, which was why she had never laughed at even a teenager with acne.

  So Vida did as her mother had taught her, and prescribed yarrow for just about everything – in a poultice, as a bandage, to be eaten a couple of times a day or drunk as a tea. And then, according to the gripe, she’d tailored each prescription by adding sage or mustard seeds or salt. She thought that just looking properly at the plum-purple heel bruise or the buttock boil or the rotten tooth abscess might set a person on the road to recovery. The rest they could do themselves.

  And while they were happier when they left the clinic than when they had first set foot in it, the people she saw did not seem as cheerful as Vida thought they should. If I had been living disease-free for this long, I would be a lot happier than these guys, she told herself. Look at them, dragging their sorry asses around! This is the best they’ve been fed and clothed and sheltered in years!

  She had wanted to talk to Dyce about it when he got back from his first shift at the mine, but she took one look at him when he got back to their little shack and left off. He’d never worked a full day in his life, and the lifting and digging and fetching of water had taken its toll. All he wanted to do was sleep. He divested himself of his wrappings, then managed to eat their dinner of mushrooms and exchange a story with Vida about the day before he collapsed on the mattress. It was stuffed with hay, which Vida thought was a terrible choice: you needed a lot of it; it got ticks and fleas after one season; and it pricked your soft parts like a cactus.

  But exhaustion canceled out discomfort. They fell asleep curled into each other, as they had done in Horse Head, the hay sweet as the mulch where the baby mushrooms nestled.

  The second day at the clinic was a little quieter. Maybe the novelty had worn off, Vida told herself. It gave her time to sit and process the past few days on her own. Between a lumpy thyroid an
d whatever minor horror might come walking in through the door, Vida tried to set it straight in her mind.

  The mushrooms were keeping everyone well, right? Antibacterial and anti-viral, as Proud Ed kept pointing out. Technically, the people of The Mouth had nothing to fear from Renard, if that was true.

  If it is true, Veedles, said her mama’s voice.

  But there were suddenly three spaces available at The Mouth – that was how they had got in. The only reason they had got in. So there must have been three people dropping dead real quick.

  Where had they got to?

  Surely no one left this place on purpose. And if they’d died – of old age or a stroke or whatever – then where had they been buried? The graves out near the church were old, and there were no new graves inside the walls, because she had checked. The way people took care of their gone-befores told you a whole lot about their attitudes towards everything else. And Vida would have noticed a big old pyre for a sky burial. She knew what to look for too. She’d seen some in her day, and they’d stained the earth black, a mark that took years to grow over or fade back to the ordinary red of the dirt.

  Would there be medical records? She looked around her office. Unlikely. This wasn’t that sort of place. She stared out of the window. It was while she was inspecting her new surroundings more closely that she saw the dust rising in the road – small V-shaped tunnels of air that brought only bad news if you were out in the open. This was when the townsfolk would come running, looking for any shelter they could find. She started getting the clinic ready for the temporary invasion, checking for gaps, securing doors and windows. At least she had provisions.

  Within minutes the gale blew in, channeled down between the valley walls. Vida watched people battling it, their clothes flapping, their hats tumbling off in cartwheels, their hair blown into their eyes. She saw the familiar dust devils, the swirling leaves and servile grasses, all the signs of ready Death on his cold, scissoring legs. She thought to find some cloth to cover her mouth and nose – but then she resisted the urge. Immunity, remember? Okay, Ed. Let’s test your theory.