On good days, she managed to get out into the garden. The hard part was getting past the front door. She would put her hand to the wood, and suddenly think, Have I got my gloves? And so she would check her coat pockets. Yes. She had her gloves. She would open the door a crack, think, Are my roots showing? and have to close it again, go to the bathroom and check her hair. And then she would have to stand by the door, breathing deep, telling herself it was only a few seconds on the street. Only a few seconds. Sometimes she hated herself for this fear. But then, if it was a good day, she would rip open the door in a rush and shut it and run down the steps, into the passageway, through the wooden gate that now had a new, shiny lock and a bolt she could push from the inside, and she would be safe.
Sometimes she spent hours in the garden, breaking concrete with a pick, hauling it into the barrow, sorting the bricks by hand into two piles: one to throw away, one to keep to make a raised flower bed. Many of the weeds she left alone. They had fought to be there; she wasn’t going to be the one to pull them out. Besides, they were green and growing, and most of them would flower in spring and summer.
Today she took a spade and started turning over the hard dirt. She leaned her weight into the spade, enjoying the way the steel bit into the black dirt, trying hard not to slice any worms.
Something rustled in the undergrowth by the west wall.
Lore went still. Listened. Nothing. She must have imagined it. She bent to her digging. Heard it again.
She put her spade down carefully, not wanting to startle whatever it was, but when she got near the tangle of weeds and dead wood and what looked like it might once have been a bicycle frame, there was a flurry of movement. She squatted down, peered under the foliage. An eye gleamed, and a tail lashed in the shadows. A cat.
They stared at each other. The cat was not pretty. Its ribs were showing, and one eye was closed, probably missing altogether. She could smell its breath, a thick, hot stink as though it had been chewing on dead things.
Lore backed away carefully. It needed feeding, that was obvious, but if she left now, would it ever come back? And if it did, did she really want the responsibility of caring for a verminous, ill animal? It was probably dying. And if she went inside to get food, she would have to come out again. Run the gauntlet twice in one day.
The cat was pushed as far back against the wall as it could get. It hissed, hissed again. Its upper right canine was missing. Maybe it was old, and had come here to die. It moved its head back and forth, looking for a way past Lore.
She wondered what was in the kitchen that a cat might like to eat, and visions of the poor starved thing wolfing down cold rice, or scraps of two-day-old sushi or beans, trying to lick its whiskers afterward, made her sigh. Now she would have to feed it.
She brought out two saucers, one with raw egg, the other with defrosted ground veal. The cat was gone. She put the dishes down in the undergrowth anyway, and went back to her spade. She did not see the cat again that afternoon.
When it got dark, she went out one more time. The plates were empty. She smiled.
She watched the net but there was never anything about her kidnapping, no stories about bodies. Not surprising. She was old news: she had been taken at the end of August and it was now December. What was unusual was the absence of information about the van de Oests. Nothing.
She scanned the business then environmental sections—still nothing. It did not make sense.
And then one day, on the news, there were her father and Tok, standing shoulder to shoulder by the fountain at Ratnapida. Tok, she noticed, was taller than her father now.
“We know she’s out there somewhere,” Oster was saying, “and we want her to come home.”
Tok, circles under his eyes and a broken air to his stance, nodded. “Please,” he said directly to the camera, “Lore, come home. It’s… Everything’s sorted out.” He looked utterly defeated.
Four months ago, Tok, with just a few breathless sentences about why Stella had killed herself, had destroyed the image Lore had built of Oster over the years. She had loved her father; she had thought he loved her. But he was a monster. It had all been a lie. And now Tok—Tok, her brother, Stella’s twin—was siding with him, telling her to come home, it was all sorted out. She did not understand.
Although she and Spanner slept together, although she might owe her life to Spanner, Lore knew instinctively that letting Spanner see chinks in her armor was dangerous. So the afternoon Spanner called from the kitchen that they had run out of bread, and suggested that Lore go to the market because they needed some other things, too, Lore knew she would have to go, would have to conceal her fear and saunter casually out into the daylight on her own.
The day was thinly overcast. The clouds spread the light into an eye-aching blanket that made her wince. It was colder than it looked. Her breath, coming in great panicky gusts, froze like gauzy sheets in front of her face. She wished she had worn a hat. She did not go back for one; she knew she would not be able to leave again.
The market sign flashed three hundred yards away. Lore started walking. If she kept her eyes on the s she would be all right. She crossed at the ceramic safeway she and Spanner always used when going to the Polar Bear. Safe territory. Known. But then she was walking north along the pavement and people were walking in front of her and across her path and toward her. There was nowhere she could look where they would not be able to see her face. She walked faster.
The market was strange: small, but with that cavernous feel of tight-margin enterprise. She picked up a basket and wandered down the first aisle, trying hard to not look as bewildered as she felt. To look vulnerable was to be vulnerable. It was all bar codes and machine voices calling out prices as her basket passed. The only people she saw were shoppers.
She picked up a head of lettuce and turned it in her hand. There was dirt on the underside. She put it back on the piles of lettuces picked up another. They were all dirty. She chose one that seemed less grubby than the others, and moved on to the carrots. It was peculiar to see them all lined up on their sides and tied together in bunches. On the rare occasions she had shopped in the past, the vegetable section in Auckland had been a series of gleaming white vats, where the lettuces and dwarf radicchio, the spinach and bok choy grew hydroponically, right there in front of you. If you wanted something, you picked it yourself. You knew it was fresh, you knew where it had been, where it had come from. These vegetables seemed… dead. Not like real vegetables at all. Where had they been grown, and how? And how did you get them clean?
She laid the carrots alongside the lettuce. The aisles did not seem very well organized. After she had walked up and down them all twice, she found the bread next to the entrance.
She joined the lines at the checkout, realized that the woman in front of her, and the man next to her in another line, both had their vegetables in plastic bags. She wondered if they brought the bags with them. The line was the worst part. People in front of her, beside her, behind her, breathing her air, all comfortable, assured, confident through having undergone this simple procedure a hundred times, a thousand times. Natives in this particular stratum of culture. In a strange country, all Lore would have to do was smile and shrug, and say loudly in English or Dutch or French that she did not understand what she should do: foreigners were allowed to make mistakes. Natives were not.
She moved one step closer to the checkout. The woman in front of her turned casually, nodded, looked at her basket, turned back to the front. Lore almost panicked and threw down her bread and vegetables. Did normal people only buy vegetables and bread? Would the woman think she was strange because her things were not in plastic bags?
In her imagination that one casual glance became a searching stare, the nod a sharp gesture of condemnation.
Was it her hair? Her clothes? But then the woman was checking her goods through the scanner, V-handing her PIDA into the metal-and-ceramic jaws of the debit counter, packing her things—canned goods mostly—into a p
lastic string bag and leaving. The scanner bleeped at her softly. “Next customer, please. Next customer, please.”
Lore waved her lettuce and carrots and bread through the scanner one by one, as she had seen the woman do. Then she stuck the V of her hand into the debit counter. It clicked green. The man behind her cleared his throat impatiently. She scooped her things up and walked quickly out of the door. Eyes followed her as she almost ran back down Springbank, across the safeway.
Spanner was working when she got back, frowning over a pile of slates. Lore’s hands shook as she put the lettuce in the refrigerator. It was two days before she went back out into the garden.
One day Spanner came home around noon and announced that they would go to the park. To Lore’s relief, they took back streets and cut-throughs and crossed the long-abandoned railway line to enter the park from the side.
Pearson Park was a pocket-sized patch of green in the middle of the west side of the city. Once, it had been part of the estate of some rich Victorian family. The statues they had erected at the jubilee of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India, remained untouched. Victoria herself, her white marble jowls turning slightly green with moss—like the shadow of a beard—graced a plinth in the rose garden. Albert, Prince Consort, lorded it over the pond and its score of mallards and moorhens and muddy-looking geese. Most of the birds were now asleep on the tiny island, head under wing, or begging scraps of bread or rice from the few hardy souls, well-wrapped against the cold, who were eating lunch away from the office. An oak tree, probably not much younger than the statues, Lore thought, had been half pulled up, pushed sideways, and trained to grow across the pond: a gnarled, moss-slippery bridge. Its roots were dug like long, bony fingers into the asphalt of the path.
Lore shivered.
“You’ll be warm where we’re going,” Spanner said. She led Lore around the pond toward a Victorian conservatory, all white wood and glass greenhouse, with clouds in every shade of gray scudding along its panes. Lore followed Spanner past the little window where a bored employee sold seedlings and saplings, and inside.
It was like walking into a line of hanging laundry, still hot and wet and smelling of earth and sunshine and fresh rain. She felt as though she had stepped through a mirror into another world, where the ash and charcoal, the grim mercury and zinc and lithium vanished into the living colors of the tropics. A bird shrieked. The light was bright, and reflected from the vivid orange of half fruits at the bottom of the aviary cages, on the flash of a purple-throated hummingbird, on huge, blowsy red flowers.
“Heliconia…” Lore said, in wonder, and lifted her face to smell. The ceiling was three stories high, and the whole space was lush with greenery.
“How the hell did you know that?”
“I’ve been in the jungle. Before.” Before all this.
She felt suddenly that her carapace had been ripped off, like a shiny scab, and she was open, raw and pink, to everything: the brilliant sherbet green of a parakeet’s tail; to a dozen variations on brown—leaf mold, dead moss, peat, bark, beetles; to the crunch of their feet on the gravel paths that wound between the vines and palms and trailers that spanned the fifty or sixty feet from loam to glass ceiling. It was these plants that seemed to interest Spanner.
Spanner stopped in front of an enormous green tower with trailing aerial roots and leaves that were fringed and full of natural holes. Lore tilted her head up, up, and was lost in the soaring spindle-weave of foliage, the tracery of different greens overhead, the architectural density of it all, like a great, Gothic cathedral.
She wondered why Spanner had brought her here.
“Monstera deliciosa, that’s its Latin name,” Spanner said. “The people who first brought it back from the jungle called it the fruit salad plant, because that’s what the fruit tastes like.” Her face was tilted up at forty-five degrees, and Lore could imagine her tramping through the tropics, braving unknown hazards to collect specimens, just to say she’d been there, a new place. But there were no more new places. Lore suddenly thought of Stella. Her sister and Spanner were very alike. They were the people who suffered because they were made for exploring the edges, pushing the boundaries. But the only boundaries left were inside.
She wanted to ask Spanner why she was letting down her barriers. Why now? She asked, instead: “Where does it come from?”
Spanner shrugged. “Nowhere, now, except hothouses.” She lifted up her face again. “I’ve been coming here for six years, watching for fruit. I wonder what they’d really taste like—what kind of fruit salad? Once I dreamt I found a pineapple as big as a barrel on the floor. When I ate a bit, it tasted like strawberries.” Her smile twisted at the last minute. “Imagine calling something that grows fruit salad a cheese plant.”
Later, as they walked the half mile home, coats wrapped tight against the winter chill, Lore silent and waiting, Spanner suddenly said, “It’s my birthday tomorrow.”
Lore looked at Spanner’s inwardly focused eyes and knew it would be pointless to ask her how old she was.
When they got back to the flat, Lore took off her jacket and went into the kitchen to make coffee. When it was done, she headed back to the living room but paused in the doorway. Spanner, still in her coat, was staring into empty space. Lore had never seen her look so vulnerable. She didn’t think she had made a sound, but Spanner’s gaze came back to the room, and focused on her. “I’m going out.”
“But-”
“What?” Spanner’s voice was harsh.
Lore looked at the cup in her hand. “Nothing.”
“Don’t wait up.”
Lore stood where she was until the front door closed; then she went back into the kitchen and carefully poured Spanner’s coffee down the drain. After a moment, she poured her own away, too.
Moving slowly, numbly, trying not to think, not to let in the pictures of Stella and Spanner, their loneliness—no, their emptiness—she picked up her coat. She buttoned it deliberately.
Don’t think about it, she told herself again, only this time it was the outside she was trying not to think about, the big wide world full of open sky and strangers who might take a casual look at her, then look again, then open their mouths to shout, to point… She opened the door and headed back to the conservatory.
It was four in the morning and all the lights in the flat were off when Spanner got back. Lore heard the chink of a bottle against the wall. “Put the light on before you kill yourself,” she called. Then she got out of bed and watched from the doorway as Spanner tugged off her jacket, tripped over the rug, saw the four-foot cheese plant, and stopped.
Lore walked barefoot into the living room. “Happy birthday.”
Spanner started to cry. Lore held her.
* * *
When the shift finally ended I was almost glad I had to go to the Polar Bear to meet Spanner. At least while I was worrying about her and my PIDA, about Magyar checking up on Bird’s records, I wouldn’t be sweating over the score of things that could go wrong at the plant.
Outside it was cold and clear. Winter was coming. When I got to the Polar Bear my face was red and my hands tingled with cold. Hyn and Zimmer were already there, with Spanner. I got myself a drink before sitting down. I took off my jacket and nodded at them.
Zimmer nodded back. “Spanner tells me what you want. We don’t get requests like that very often.”
“It’s rare,” Hyn agreed.
“And we don’t know of anyone who’s holding what you need.”
“But you could find out,” Spanner said.
“Oh, yes,” Hyn said, “but do you really want us to?” I took a sip of my beer. It was cool and nutty. “They’re not the kind of people it’s wise to know.”
Spanner laughed. “Nor am I. Nor are you, not really.” No one said anything about me.
Hyn and Zimmer looked at each other. They seemed troubled. “Do you really need this equipment?”
“Yes.”
Zimmer touched my wri
st with one brown gnarled finger. “And you?” His eyes looked more like berries than ever, and still bright, but older somehow.
I nodded reluctantly. “Yes.”
Hyn sighed. “Then we’ll do it. But it’ll be expensive.” We all knew she was talking about more than money.
“How much?”
Hyn shrugged, looked at Zimmer. “Fifteen thousands. Maybe more.”
That was more than I had expected. “I’m not-”
“We’ll get the money.”
I looked at her. “Spanner, I don’t-”
“We’ll have the money,” Spanner repeated to Hyn and Zimmer. “Just let us know when and where, and you’ll have it.”
I had never seen them look so unhappy, but they nodded and stood. They left their unfinished drinks on the table.
Hyn and Zimmer were scared, but danger was just an adventure to Spanner. It put her in a good mood. We sipped at our beer in silence. This was not the only kind of danger I was in. If Magyar decided to use some budget on a backcheck of Bird’s record, she would see straightaway that I knew more than I had a right to. And then she might be able to justify a deeper search. And that meant she would find out Bird had died a while ago. And then I was in real trouble. Might as well take advantage of Spanner’s good mood.
“I changed my mind about the PIDA records. I need that information substituting as soon as possible.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“No problem.”
Silence again. This time it lengthened until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “Where will you get the money?”
Slow River Page 9
