The Seventh Day

by Joy Dettman

  Anyway, Gran got a whole heap of new materials so she’s busy cutting out her Red Cross aprons and talking about when she was a girl and how the wood stove cooked better and heated up the whole house and how we might be glad to have it if the worst comes to the worst.

  Mum bought heaps of stuff, mainly tins of food and jars of food and stuff sealed in plastic. And she bought three pairs of cheap sneakers that don’t even fit anyone and that me and Emma would never wear in a pink fit, and the only reason she bought them was because the shoe shop was throwing them out for next to nothing, and also because Mum’s stars in today’s paper said, ‘Planetary action could set up a confrontation. Be prepared to take things to the next stage.’ I don’t know what cheap sneakers have got to do with anything. She got other crazy stuff too, like boxes and boxes of matches and even cigarette lighters, and no one even smokes in this house. Me and Emma had to help unload it and there’s stuff stacked all over the place, and Dad said that’s enough and that’s what he’s saying now. I’ve got to go because he wants to use the internet.

  Still May. The news said lots of people in Melbourne have got it, and so heaps of people are going to the country where no one has got it yet, so Mum and Mrs Logan drove all the way to the Shepparton Cannery and they said that the roads were stuffed. Anyway they came home with the Commodore boot full of preserved fruit and tomato soup and stuff, and Mr Rowan and his son that just got married, well, they were here fixing up the bricks that they had to take out to get all the building stuff down to the cellar and they laughed at Mum like they always do when they see her bringing home her bags of stuff. Which is probably a bit stupid, because everyone says Australia is safe, because we’re an island, and that we had time to get ready for the disease and to get the right medicines. And also we’ve got the water all around us and like heaps of soldiers and the navy boats to stop the illegals coming here. Anyway, Mum said to Mr Rowan, ‘He who laughs last laughs longest, Mr Rowan.’ And she just kept on carrying the boxes inside and piling them in the kitchen. All the Rowans have to do now is put in a little window, sort of for air, or escape – if the house gets bombed – Ha Ha. Then they have to build some shelves and then we’ll be able to store the stuff in the cellar and stop tripping over it.

  The journal speaks much of television and Toyota, and much of food. I think Aaron is very young. He writes of killing a sheep for meat, as Lenny kills the young bullocks for meat. He writes more of the beasts’ disease and also of Mr Gillmartin’s horses.

  Mr Logan says that the virus has changed. The horses were okay right up to now, then all of a sudden, it’s like they all get it at once and now they’re all dead. It doesn’t seem to hurt pigs. Mr Martin has got heaps of pigs and he’s making pots of money from them because the only meat the butcher is allowed to sell is pork and chicken and also he’s now selling rabbits.

  I do not know the horse, though I have seen likenesses in the books and read much of the riding of them. Fine tall beasts they were. How strange it would be to live in a world with such giants. It is surely a different world Aaron writes of, such strange times. I know money – from the books, but how did they make pots from it? Granny once said to me, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword. Why, girl?’ A sword, I knew even then, was a long sharp knife-like tool the old king used to cut off the queen’s head. I remember looking long at Granny’s precious stub of pencil and not believing her words, for at that time even her hitting stick was much stronger. She was attempting to teach me the task of pencil writing, which I did not wish to learn, for I preferred making colourful letters with my paints on bark and brick. Certainly the machine that made Aaron’s journal was mightier than that pencil. Its small print has remained clear. My child writing on the unused pages of Granny’s books has faded clean away. I believed her riddles were spoken to make sport of me and in later years I did not try to decipher them, but today I take one of Aaron’s long pencils in my hand and stare at it. It is not a mighty tool at all. It is small and of wood. I could break it as easily as a twig.

  But the pencil is here, and the sword is not.

  The sword was of metal, and unbreakable. The sword killed many.

  ‘Ah. But the pencil recorded the killings, as with the king who cut off heads. We can not now see the sword, but we know of it because of the pencil. Yes. Yes. I have deciphered your riddle, Granny. Are you listening?’

  She makes no reply, but I am pleased with myself as I sort through the many pencils. Some are of wood with a centre of colour buried within, as with Granny’s small pencil stub. The wooden pencils write cleanly, but the plasti and metal kind make no mark at all. How well it would have been to have learned to write with these pencils; I did not hold Granny’s precious stub at all well in my small hand.

  What age was I then? Time in childhood is a meaningless thing. There was the heat of summer and the chill of winter and the times between.

  Granny understood time. She had a square of the old timber and each year of my childhood she drew a calendar of months and days on it, and she knew the names of each day. While she lived, her old grandfather clock had counted the hours of her days.

  ‘My time on earth is a gift. Do not measure a gift,’ she said to me, and said it often, and I think now, so what was her obsession with that clock, so what was her obsession with her calendars, and her days of the week, if not a measuring of time? Much of what she said meant little to me back then. She spoke in picture and poem and riddle.

  ‘Jem had gone feral by the time I got back,’ she had said one day. ‘He’d lived alone here after his father died for nigh on thirty years, lived with his animals. I stole his pumpkins first, then started creeping down at night, stripping the milk from his cows.’

  When she had spoken of Jem, I had not known of whom she had spoken. Now I know that he is old Pa, near newborn at the time Granny was taken. And the one she named Jem’s bastard, her own son, Lenny.

  As the years of my childhood passed, so too had the horror of Granny’s burned features. The hideous became the normal. My young eye learned to make its own comparisons, as it did with the grey dust and the soft green of Pa’s pumpkin patch, and their sweet yellow flowers.

  I recall asking her once where we lived on the world map. She had pointed to a pink shape. ‘That’s Morgan Hill, girl,’ she said. ‘And that’s all there is.’

  Back then, I believed that shape to be the Morgan acres, the point at the top was our hill! Lord, why did she confuse me so? Why did she not speak to me in words I understood?

  I recall the day I saw a flying machine gliding in the sky and it had been as free and silent as an eagle. I recall her fear of it, and my lack of fear. I had run out to the yard and she had followed me, grasped my hair, her free hand hitting hard as she dragged me indoors.

  ‘It’s a searcher,’ she had screamed.

  ‘What is he searching for?’

  ‘For what I stole from him.’ She had laughed then, and sat down hard on a chair, laughing, holding her breast, coughing and near choking on her laughter. I brought water and stood back, watching the patchwork of her face glow with reds and purple-blue until I began to fear that the fine parchment would split wide and peel away and her white bones would spring free.

  It was long before I asked my question. ‘What did you steal from him?’

  ‘His future.’

  ‘How can you steal a future, Granny?’

  ‘You steal his children, girl.’

  My questions died long before Granny died. We had placed her in the earth, closed her door, and I had near stopped my thinking of her by the night the grey men came.

  How well I remember that night. I remember the noise of the giant flying machine and the dogs barking and Lenny – he had sent me to the barn to hide while he and old Pa waited on the verandah with their dogs and dart guns.

  ‘We ain’t trading and we ain’t giving nothing away,’ Pa had spoken his greeting while I spied on the three funny little men, not fearing them at all. Nor had I feared the two wh
o stood behind them with the light-guns.

  Why had I not feared them? Because I had known them – or known others like them.

  But one gun then made a fine line of purple light that felled Pa and Lenny had tossed his dart gun to the earth. Then I had feared the guns and the little men and I had not waited to see more but hid in the loft as Lenny had bade me hide.

  That is where he found me.

  He carried me to the kitchen and held me, and the stink of his sweat was in my nostrils, and the strange smell of the little grey men, strong, as they stripped me of the rags I wore, then cleansed me with fluid from a flask before using their tools on me to steal my blood and to pry into my ears and my mouth. And all the time there was the chill of their small, grey, plasti-wrapped hands.

  And . . . and I was on the table.

  And Pa, he was on the floor, a gun at his head.

  And Lenny. He shook so hard as he held me for my tormentors, who spoke together of my blood and of fever and of immunity and immaturity while studying me as I might study a strange beetle blown in on the wind. Lenny did not speak, but his hands on me dripped wet with the sweat of fear.

  Granny was dead. Her pain had ended. Mine was beginning. The grey men gave me much pain when they wished to study the inner parts of me. I screamed and kicked out at one of the little men, sent him to the floor, and I rolled from the table, and with my hands tried to cover my nakedness from their eyes.

  Better that I had run for a knife.

  ‘Control her,’ a grey man demanded, and Lenny grasped me again, held me, and for the first time the men used their paralysing tool on my neck.

  ‘The breeding females are difficult to control,’ one said to Lenny. I remember that, though I did not understand the words, or Lenny’s reply.

  ‘She ain’t of breeding age.’

  ‘She will be.’

  I remember little after that. My limbs were no longer my own to command, and so fast I lost command of my mind. Only scattered segments remain of that night and the days that followed, only shredded newsprint tossed on the wind. Only the bright light of the grey men. Only the dark of my bed. Only the pink drink when I thirsted.

  I drank it. It was sweet and cool and calming. I liked pink.

  My bedding altered. The scent of my room altered, but the little man beside my bed never altered, though each day he wore a different name on his shoulder ornament. Stanley. Sidley. Salter. But always those same protruding grey marble eyes. Always that same small grey hand offering cordial or stealing my blood or delving into the inner parts of me. Painful. Intrusive.

  The cordial brought calmness, acceptance of their intrusion, brought sleep. And soon what was sleep, and what wakefulness? And time, what was time?

  I did not know, nor do I now know, how much time passed. There was the cordial and the pills when I opened my eyes, and sometimes in the night the harsh roar of the flying machine and the shuddering of the windows when it flew away. And there came the nightly chorus of the wailing and the screaming that was not of my making. I knew it was not of my making. My screams had been silenced. I had learned that screaming brought only the grey men with the tool they used on my neck, the tool that made my limbs become as wood. I did not wish to be wooden so I did not scream.

  Then one day there was the new thump-a-thump-a-thumping in my waking, in my sleeping, and there was the bright white light overhead, like a brilliant moon.

  I watched that moon, for the ones outside had been stolen from me. I liked that moon that cleansed my room of shadow, and I became aware of the bed I lay on, and I became aware of the straps that bound my hands and my feet. I became aware of the light coverings on my bed and of the softness of the pillow beneath my head.

  I did not see Lenny and Pa, did not hear them, and thought them dead. I heard only the flying machine, saw only the little grey men – one or three I did not know, only that each day he wore a different name on his shoulder ornament.

  Slowly there came a rhythm to the days, the cleansings and the cordial, the pills, the sleeping and the waking, and there came a great peace to me, so deep that I cared not when the shining tools were brought to my room, or that I was clad only in my so-clean skin and nothing more.

  I remember the day and the blood of the first immature foetus.

  Two.

  I remember the grey hands placing the unformed beings into small plasti-containers, and I knew not what they were, only that they had been drawn from out of me. And I understood not how these grey men had made these things from my flesh.

  I was a child.

  I was a sow.

  I screamed while the grey men clucked over the foetus like hens over their new chicks.

  Then they took them and they went away and I screamed.

  Lenny was not dead. He came to my room, clad in a fitting garment of green that clung as a skin to his broad shoulders and chest, that shaped his short tree-trunk legs. He did not much look like Lenny in his new clothes, but he sounded like Lenny.

  ‘Get some food into you, girl, then we’ll get you out of this frekin room. They aint coming back – not for a time. Not taking you either – not for a time.’

  He had freed my hands from the wrist straps that bound them but I did not wish to leave my bed and I wanted no food. I screamed long until Pa came to lean against my door, so thin, so pale, weak from the hurt of their light-gun, and still clothed in the hides of a wild man, though never again the wild man he had been.

  I screamed at him also. The men could not calm me.

  Pa brought my cordial. He sat on my bed, held the mug for me while I gulped it down. And he brought more.

  ‘It will do her no frekin good, Pa. It’s poison. You seen what it done to me when I drank the shit.’

  ‘Better she was poisoned,’ the old one had said. ‘Better we was all poisoned, boy. We shoulda fought them little bastards to the death, died with heads high, boy.’

  I remember that.

  Lenny it was who later brought me the pills. Lenny it was who for many days lifted me from my bed and carried me into the sun, sat me in Granny’s rocking chair.

  The grey men were gone. Slowly, so slowly I began to believe that my nightmare was over. They were gone.

  But their cordial and pills remained, and their strange machines, and their fence, and the clothing they had brought for us, and the strange food.

  But they came again, to begin again.

  And again. And again.

  (Excerpt from the New World Bible)

  There was great celebration and rejoicing in the western city when the copters were sighted, and many came to the air-road centre to view the unloading of the female bounty.

  And there was much sport to be seen, for amongst the feral females there were those who wept, and those who spat, and those who pleaded with strange accents. And some were clad in tattered garments of the old world, and some were clad in hides, and some were unclad.

  And there were those who were of a different colour to the norm. And those of a different species to the norm. And some were taller than a man, and some small as an infant but with the breasts of an adult.

  And much talk and interest they raised, and they were documented and likenesses made of them, and these likenesses were traded for cordial at the dividing fence.

  And in recreation halls of the eastern city the labourers exchanged their promissory notes for these likenesses, and they gambled so that they might possess the prizes for a time.

  Thus it came to pass that the Chosen weekly displayed a feral female at the recreation halls, where the labourers might spend their promissory notes on the viewing of the spitting fiends.

  And lotteries were held and the prize was a mating with a gigantic female who could not be tamed by the cordial, for she was as the man-eaters of the old world who ate of man and painted their bodies with the blood of their prey.

  And the High Priest and the High Chosen came to the recreation hall to award the prize and they remained to watch the sport.
/>   And the winner was the loser.

  SCATTERED PAGES

  The days have been fine, and for many I have found occupation away from Aaron’s pages. This morning the rain comes again, and strong, so I return to Aaron’s room thinking to save his pages from a flood. The room remains dry. I sit a while glancing at his June page, then I see in July he tells of a storm.

  July: Someone left the window open in here last night, and the wind came and scattered the pages everywhere. I nearly chucked it in the bin, but Mrs Logan came in and she stopped me. She said I’m doing an excellent job, and I’m the only one of the kids who has kept going with the diary and that I have to keep on doing it. The Logans have moved in with us, because Mrs Logan is Mum’s best friend and she’s getting a baby soon, and we’re right up the top of the mountain in the fresh air and if our cows didn’t get the animal disease, then we mightn’t get the human disease either.

  Heaps of people in the cities have got it, like there’s no more school anywhere, because all anyone has to do is breathe on you and you’re good as dead and the Prime Minister is on the news all the time saying stuff, and the health people are giving warnings, and it will probably be okay once summer comes because the hot weather might kill the bugs, but Mr Logan, who is a smart-arse, says the hot weather will make it worse, because Tommy Martin heard him say it. Also, he heard him say that Gran’s fall-out shelter might come in handy because Retribution is still heading towards earth.

  We used to have two spare bedrooms until the Logans moved in. Now we’ve just got the study. And today Dad asked the Martins to move in with us and they’ll have to sleep in the sunroom. Two bathrooms used to be plenty when it was just us. Since the Logans came, everyone is always waiting to get to the loo and Emma has to share her room with Dallas, and if the Martins come, I’ll have to share with Tommy and Jake and we’ll be like sardines packed in a can. Mum’s got about umpteen million cans of sardines and I hate them.