by Peter Liney
“So all this is because of me?” Delilah groaned.
“No!” Lena protested. “It’s because of me!”
“Hey, come on,” I told them. “It ain’t you up there burning and killing.”
But even though Delilah gave a slight nod, as if acknowledging my point, Lena didn’t even seem to hear me. And as I gazed at her, frustrated that she obviously intended to say no more, I wasn’t altogether surprised to see that familiar haunted expression form on her face.
I didn’t press her. For the rest of the day I tried to carry on as normal. Making a point of agreeing with Jimmy and Delilah when they said there was no way De Grew could be sure it was her—especially after her having left the Camp so long ago—dismissing any notion of him ever being able to find us in the tunnels, but still allowing Lena her silence and space.
Yet later, in bed, as if it had been building up all day, tears suddenly breached that obstruction, flowing over it and everywhere.
It’s strange, but tears coming out of her eyes, welling up from within her blindness, is like a terrible miracle and hurts all the more for it. I wished to God there was something I could say. But how could I? I didn’t have a clue what it was all about, and to be honest, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. Trouble is, sometimes you don’t get a choice. And when she finally did start to speak, I knew my heart was about to be broken.
We don’t know much about what happens in the Camp. We know the results in terms of us: that as soon as we’re unprotected a deranged and desensitized mob comes over to terrorize and kill, but I guess they have a life over there, too. There have to be people and problems and getting by. They ain’t just robots. Well, that night Lena well and truly educated me in their ways, and it turns out it ain’t quite as simple as I thought. I mean, we’ve always regarded that place as evil and that was an end to it, but there are varying degrees of evil and they got their victims too. The other thing I found out was, well, she didn’t exactly lie to me that day she told me her story, but she had left a lot out.
Not all the kids go on raids. In fact, according to her, it’s very much the minority. In a strange way, most of them are like us: stuck in a society they didn’t create and doing what they can to survive it. They do their work and get paid with food, shelter, and occasionally drugs. That’s all there is. All they’ll probably ever know. Meanwhile, De Grew’s making a fortune out of that place. Apparently that home of his on the hill overlooking the Camp, has everything. Swimming pool, cinema, every damn luxury item you can think of. He’s even got outdoor extractors so he don’t have to suffer the smell of the Island. Up there he can be in a pine forest, a spring meadow, anything he chooses. Can you imagine how that must make the kids feel? Every day living in shit, thigh-deep in it, then looking up there and seeing what he’s got. They’d do anything for a piece of it.
Which brings me to the part of Lena’s story that really hurts. I mean, I knew there was something, I just didn’t know how bad. Like I said, the kids’ve got a pretty distorted sense of values, it ain’t hard to corrupt them. If De Grew sees someone on the landfills who takes his fancy, girl or boy, he gets them sent up to the house, cleaned up, and given a room. It don’t matter how young they are. Some of them apparently ain’t much more than babes. From then on he pretty well does whatever he wants with them. I ain’t going to go into details. I didn’t even want to hear it myself. All I will say is that most of them don’t last long. Some, the less “compliant” or “enthusiastic,” that ain’t “no fun,” don’t scream in the right way or whatever, are lucky if they get through the night. Afterward they get passed on to the other Wastelords, and pretty soon disappear altogether. As if their death is the final thrill they have to offer.
Like I said . . . they got their victims too. What I hadn’t expected was that Lena was one of them. ’Cuz the sorry truth is, she was one of those who got transferred up to the house for “special duties.” I mean, she’s not exactly your conventional idea of pretty, and apparently she was out here some years before it happened, but one day, after a chance meeting with De Grew, she got the “invitation.”
At first she just did what she was told and nothing more, so grateful to be out of the shit and stench, that wretched existence, she didn’t care about anything else. But as time went by, and she began to see the way it worked—how everyone was eventually tired of and dispensed with—she realized that if she was going to survive, she had to do that bit extra. So she did. Everything they wanted, everything she could think of, and a bit more. And apparently she was really good at it too. So good that, despite not being as pretty as some, she lasted a whole lot longer. For almost five years, in fact. Still, in the end, De Grew tired of her, just like he tired of everyone else. The one concession he made to her long-standing servitude was to let her go back to the landfills rather than be handed off to another Wastelord and disappear.
It never occurred to him that she might have her own agenda while living with him. That she might be spying in case it ever came in useful, studying his operation, even making a set of duplicate keys. If she hadn’t been caught in a blowout, if she hadn’t taken refuge in the tunnels, he probably would never have known. For sure it would’ve never crossed his mind that she’d come back to haunt him the way she has. No wonder he’s so angry, so determined to find her and pay her back for what she’s done.
It’s shit to admit, but as sad as I felt for Lena, the more she told me, the more detail she went into, the more it felt like something blunt and rusty was whittling away at my insides. When she finally finished, I couldn’t bring myself to say a thing. I knew she wanted me to, that she was waiting, but for some reason it just wouldn’t come. I felt as if my life had been broken into and all the best parts stolen.
For a long while we lay there, an aching silence gaping ever wider between us. Eventually she turned to me, demanding I said something. “Well?”
I paused for a long time. “What?”
“Say something.”
“What can I say?”
“I don’t know.”
Again I paused. “Just a bit shocked, I guess.”
Immediately she lost her temper with me. “Don’t you judge me, Clancy!”
“I’m not!”
“Not by your standards. They don’t apply anymore. Not ’round here.”
I don’t know why, but that hurt me more than anything she said. Or maybe I let it hurt me more, I don’t know. With that one accusation I suddenly felt lost—old, tired, and obsolete. As if any pain caused was of my own making.
Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and went to find myself somewhere else to sleep farther up the tunnel. I mean, I felt bad for her, I really did, I could’ve so easily wept, but it was just too painful to lie there any longer.
The next morning I woke full of blood and bile. I was fermenting away most of the night, tossing and turning, and the conclusion I came to was that suddenly I felt embarrassed by my relationship with Lena. I mean, who the hell am I trying to kid? The only reason it happened was cuz of circumstances, cuz she’s blind and can’t see what she’s been getting herself into. Inevitably the age gap had finally yawned and my tired old carcass had slipped straight through, there to lie buried forever.
I spent the whole day refusing to speak to anyone. Not a word. Compared with my mood now, my disposition over in the Village had been positively sunny. To make matters even more pointed, Jimmy came up from his workshop later that morning all flushed and excited, saying he had a surprise for us all. I just shrugged and stalked past him on my way down to the garden, ignoring his yelping protests to come back, that I’d “miss it.” The only thing I wanted from this world was to be left alone.
It’s funny how we are about nature, about green stuff. I can remember, even as a kid, when things went wrong, when my old lady was after me or something, I always retreated somewhere like the park. “Sanctuary,” that’s what Father Donald used to call it. ’Course, he would’ve preferred me to come to church, but he d
idn’t get to see that happen very often. Not that there was anything wrong with Father Donald. He was a good guy. Outside of Mr. Meltoni, maybe the only one who’d ever looked out for me. But at that age there are some professions you’re just never going to take to, no matter who’s representing them.
I remember after my old man’s funeral, at the family get-together, he went around and spoke to everyone, even us kids. Real words, too. Stuff he’d thought about. None of this “Thanks for the glass of cheap sherry and you’d better all be in church next Sunday otherwise God’s gonna take another one of yours out.” He took me aside and explained that God had probably called my father to heaven cuz he needed some good work doing. However, I told him it was more likely that God had gotten fed up with seeing him beating up on my old lady and was taking him up there to give him a good whopping.
I guess priests ain’t supposed to laugh at stuff like that, but Father Donald practically choked on his cake. After that, whenever he saw me he would burst out into this smile and I knew he was thinking about what I said. At first it used to irritate me, but after a while it made me smile too. It’s nice I brought him a little happiness all those years. Even now I can still see him: standing on the steps of the church, a big fringe of gray hair whipping around his forehead, looking all serious and reproachful at his errant flock, then seeing me coming and getting jumped on by that smile. Not that I stopped for him. Even when he called me over I just pretended I didn’t hear him and hurried by on the other side of the street.
Looking back on it, I guess Father Donald was a bit like me: a man out of his time, swimming against a drowning tide. The more the Church updated itself, the more I had this sense of him barricading himself in, piling pews up against the door. I mean, maybe if they’d stuck to what he believed, to what we’d come to trust them for, they might’ve made a difference. All those who got so lost might’ve found themselves in God, but the Church decided to embrace the enterprise economy like everyone else. They got into real estate, selling off their land, charging for services, leasing the franchises of churches to priests. It was crazy: Holy Trinity Inc. People thought they had to hold stock to be sure of a place in heaven. Naturally, everyone wanted to do business with them. They had prime sites, ones never considered available for commercial purposes, and, by inference, an unblemished reputation. Then they got themselves into a couple of scandals. Things started to slide. And finally the stock market managed to do what two thousand years, numerous wars, and countless heads of state hadn’t: bring down Christianity.
I’d been digging for a couple of hours and my back was starting to tell me how it used to be able to do this sort of thing all day but now couldn’t, when suddenly I heard a distant cry from what I guessed to be the living area. I stopped for a moment, wondering if I’d imagined it—I mean, it’s a fair distance—when there it was again.
It wasn’t a cry of alarm, more like joy or excitement, and I’ll tell you, the mood I was in, it irritated the hell out of me. I couldn’t imagine what was worth making so much noise over. I hesitated for a moment, deciding whether to ignore it or not, but then it started up again.
For chrissake, how could they be so stupid? If I could hear them in the garden, then it was possible they could be heard up top. I tossed down my shovel and stormed off in their direction, determined to give someone a piece of my mind. However, as I approached the living area, as I began to turn that long bend in the tunnel, I got such a shock it blew all thoughts of reprimand away.
I could see the glow of a light up ahead. Not a candle or a fire, an electric light. I was that confused I started to run, all sorts of thoughts ricocheting around my mind. Had someone got in? Had they found us somehow? But as the living area came fully into sight I saw no strangers, no invaders, just a proud and excited little guy jigging around in front of Delilah and Lena.
He’s fixed up an electric light. Down here in the tunnels. There it was, hanging from the roof, solitary and glowing white, like some guiding star. Jimmy turned as I approached, so delighted when he saw my astonished face.
“What d’you think, Big Guy?”
I gaped for a moment, the others eagerly awaiting my reaction.
“How the hell d’you do that?” I asked.
He pointed above his head. There was a windmill thing attached to the roof of the tunnel, like the ones he used to have on his lean-to, only made out of metal. It was rotating away, driven by the tunnel winds and presumably—though please don’t ask me how—generating electricity.
“I told you I could change the world if I had the right materials!” he cried.
“Ain’t it great, Clancy?” Delilah shouted, more proud of her bald-headed little hero than I ever could’ve imagined.
“Sure is,” I said, staring at that single light as if it was the eighth wonder of the world.
It was some time before it occurred to me how little it meant to Lena. I turned to her and, as she often seems to do, she sensed me looking.
“What kind of light is it?” she asked.
I paused for a moment. I mean, shit to admit, but despite all the excitement, I still didn’t feel like talking to her. Thankfully, Delilah got in before it became obvious.
“Aw. Just a light, I guess,” she said, deliberately playing it down. “Just a whitish kind of everyday light.”
But it wasn’t true and we all knew it, even Lena. It wasn’t an “everyday light.” It was the first one to illuminate our darkness, and, as such, a symbol of hope. As if the human race was starting to fight back, regaining some small measure of control over its environment. We already had fire in our cave, now we had light as well.
For the rest of the day none of us was able to leave it for any great length of time. It was a miracle. Electricity, taken for granted for so many generations, was a wonder again and we were left breathless by it. When the time finally came for us to go to bed, Jimmy, who hadn’t managed to wire in a switch, went to disconnect it, but we wouldn’t let him. We wanted to look at it a bit longer. To wake up at night and find it shining there.
Despite all the excitement, I still have to admit, it was a solitary bed I went to that night. Lena and I barely exchanged a word all day. I mean, not that that’s so unusual. Some days we don’t speak that much. The way we see it, if you got something worth saying, say it, if you haven’t, keep your mouth shut. Whereas Jimmy and Delilah like to have a constant babble going, as if to reassure themselves the other one’s still there. Nor does it seem to matter if it’s happy talk, bitching, or whatever, just as long as that signal’s getting passed back and forth.
But even when you’re not talking, it’s surprising how many moods silence can have. You’d think silence was like a glass of water waiting for a flavor—but it ain’t. It can be far more potent than any conversation. The silence between Lena and me felt like a slab of stone waiting for a chisel. The only trouble was, neither of us was of a mind to do the carving. I knew I wasn’t behaving that well. Not for a grown-up. That I’d gone off on some mad-assed emotional tangent. But I was into a lot of lonely old thinking. I felt lost and rejected, humiliated somehow, and I wasn’t able to do anything about it.
It was a bit like the time Mr. Meltoni took on this new heavy—Thomas. He wasn’t like me. He was younger and smarter and could talk about all sorts of things I knew nothing about. Like books, foreign movies, even wine and food. Him and Mr. Meltoni had conversations about that sort of stuff all day and I’d just stand there, smiling, nodding, trying to look like I knew what they were talking about when I really didn’t have a clue. It never occurred to me that Mr. Meltoni would want to talk to one of his boys. It wasn’t my place. Still, after a while I thought I’d give it a try. One morning I went in early, when I knew we’d be alone, and asked him what he thought about last night’s big game. He just brushed it aside, like it was nothing. Matter of fact, I don’t even think he knew there’d been a big game.
The problem is, sometimes I think that having muscles is a bit like being beautiful: it
’s so obvious what you are, no one expects you to be anything else. Nor are they going to give you the chance to try. It’s only since I been out on the Island that I actually started to read properly. And d’you know something? I’m nowhere near as stupid as I thought. Okay, I’m not telling you I’m super-intelligent or nothing, but I reckon I’ve read just about every book that’s circulated around the Village—fact and fiction. Which I guess makes me sort of self-educated. I even had a dictionary for a while. I used to make myself learn three new words a day. Walking around, repeating them to myself over and over. “‘Ideology’ . . . ‘idiosyncratic.’” ’Course I’m too embarrassed to actually say them most of the time, but I don’t mind writing them down occasionally. Maybe you noticed the odd one?
Anyways, that period, when Thomas first arrived and Mr. Meltoni and him were forever exchanging jokes and conversation, being all smart and sophisticated, hurt me more than anyone can ever know. I felt like one of Mr. Meltoni’s old limos getting driven away while he proudly stood before the new one. I even put the word out that I was looking for another job. Then one day, when Thomas tried to talk to Mr. Meltoni about French wines and Swedish films, he was too busy. A week later Thomas disappeared. Not from the neighborhood, I don’t mean, but from everything. From existence, maybe. I never asked why or what had gone on. Like I said, I never thought it was my place to start a conversation.
But if I felt lonely and obsolete then, it ain’t nothing to how I feel now. I’ve always had this concern that I was far too old for Lena, that she’s only been doing these things with me cuz there’s no one else around, but I didn’t want to believe it. You gotta take other people’s feelings into account in this life. It’s been a long time since I held anyone like I hold her. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever held anyone that way. It’s okay for her. She’s young. No matter how things turn out she’s still got a chance of meeting someone else one day. But I won’t. I know that. After her, there’ll be nothing. And as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t want there to be.
