Year of the Flood: Novel (20 page)

39

Be careful what you wish for, old Pilar used to say. I was back at the HelthWyzer Compound and I was reunited with my father, just as I used to wish long ago. But nothing felt right. All that faux marble, and the reproduction antique furniture, and the carpets in our house — none of it seemed real. It smelled funny too — like disinfectant. I missed the leafy smells, of the Gardeners, the cooking smells, even the sharp vinegar tang; even the violet biolets.

My father — Frank — hadn’t changed my room. But the four-poster bed and the pink curtains looked shrunken. It also looked too young for me. There were the plush animals I’d once loved so much, but their glass eyes looked dead. I stuffed them into the back of my closet so they wouldn’t be able to look through me as if I was a shadow.

The first night, Lucerne ran a bath for me with fake-flower bath essence in it. The big white tub and the white fluffy towels made me feel dirty, and also stinky. I stank like earth — compost earth, before it’s finished. That sour odour.

Also my skin was blue: it was the dye from the Gardener clothes. I’d never really noticed it because the showers at the Gardeners were so brief, and there weren’t any mirrors. I hadn’t noticed, either, how hairy I’d become, and that was more of a shock than my blue skin. I rubbed and rubbed at the blue: it wouldn’t come off. I looked at my toes, where they stuck up out of the bath water. The toenails looked like claws.

“Let’s put some polish on those,” Lucerne said two days later, when she saw my feet in flip-flops. She was acting as if none of it had ever happened — not the Gardeners, not Amanda, and especially not Zeb. She was wearing crisp linen suits, she’d had her hair styled and streaked. She’d already had her own toes done — she’d wasted no time. “Look at all these colours I bought for you! Green, purple, frosted orange, and I got you some sparkly ones …” But I was angry with her, and I turned away. She was such a liar.

All those years I’d kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I’d coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright, and the outline had been too large: Frank was shorter, greyer, balder, and more confused-looking than what I’d had in mind.

Before he’d come to the HelthWyzer gatehouse to identify us, I’d thought he’d be overjoyed to find that we were safe and sound and not dead after all. But when he saw me, his face fell. Now I realize that he’d last known me when I was a small girl, so I was bigger than he expected, and probably bigger than he wanted. I was also shabbier — despite the drab Gardener clothes, I must have looked like one of the pleebrats he might have seen running around if he’d ever even been to the Sinkhole or the Sewage Lagoon. Maybe he was afraid I was going to pick his pockets or grab his shoes. He approached me as if I might bite, and put his arms awkwardly around me. He smelled of complex chemicals — the kind of chemicals used for cleaning off sticky things, like glue. A smell that could burn right down into your lungs.

On that first night I slept for twelve hours, and when I woke up I found that Lucerne had taken away my Gardener clothes and burnt them. Luckily I’d hidden Amanda’s purple phone inside the plush tiger in my closet — I’d cut open the stomach. So the phone didn’t get burnt.

I missed the smell of my own skin, which had lost its salty flavour and was now soapy and perfumy. I thought about what Zeb used to say about mice — if you take them out of the mouse nest for a while and then put them back, the other mice will tear them apart. If I went back to the Gardeners with my fake-flower smell, would they tear me apart?

Lucerne took me to the HelthWyzer In-clinic so I could be checked for head lice and worms, and for being interfered with. That meant a couple of fingers up you, front and back. “Oh my goodness,” the doctor said when he saw my blue skin. “Are these bruises, dear?”

“No,” I said. “It’s dye.”

“Oh,” he said. “They made you dye yourself?”

“It’s in the clothes,” I said.

“I see,” he said. Then he made an appointment for me with the In-clinic psychiatrist, who had experience with people who’d been snatched by cults. My mother would have to be at those appointments as well.

Which was how I found out what Lucerne was telling them. We’d been grabbed off the street while in SolarSpace doing some boutique shopping, but she couldn’t say exactly where we’d been taken because she’d never been allowed to know. She said it wasn’t the fault of the cult itself — it was one of the male members who’d been obsessed with her and wanted her for his personal sex slave, and had taken away her shoes to keep her captive. This was supposed to be Zeb, though she said she didn’t know his name. I’d been too young to realize what was going on, she said, but I’d been a hostage — she’d had to do the bidding of this madman, service his every twisted whim, it was revolting the things he’d made her do — or my life would have been in danger. But she’d finally been able to share her plight with one of the other cult members — a sort of nun. She must have meant Toby. It was this woman who’d helped her to escape — brought her shoes, given her money, lured the madman away so Lucerne could make a dash for freedom.

It was no use asking me anything, she said. The cult members had been nice to me, and anyway they’d been duped. She’d been the only one who’d known the truth: it was a burden she’d had to carry alone. What woman who loved her child as much as she loved me wouldn’t have done the same?

Before our psychiatry sessions, she’d squeeze my shoulder and say, “Amanda’s back there. Keep that in mind.” Meaning that if I told anyone she’d been lying her hair off she’d suddenly remember where she’d been imprisoned, and the CorpSeCorps would go in there with their spray-guns, and who knew what might happen? Bystanders got killed a lot in spraygun attacks. It couldn’t be helped, said the CorpSeCorps. It was in the interests of public order.

For weeks Lucerne hovered around to make sure I wouldn’t try to run away or else rat on her. But at last I got a chance to take out Amanda’s purple phone and call. Amanda had texted me with the number of the new phone she’d lifted, so I’d know where to reach her — she thought ahead about everything. I sat inside my closet to make the call. It had a light inside, like all the closets in the house. The closet itself was as big as my former sleeping cubicle.

Amanda answered right away. There she was on the screen, looking the same as ever. I longed to be back at the Gardeners.

“I really miss you,” I said. “I’m running away as soon as I can.” But I didn’t know when that would be, I said, because Lucerne was keeping my identity locked in a drawer, and I wouldn’t be allowed past the gatehouse without it.

“Can’t you trade?” said Amanda. “With the guards?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. It’s different here.”

“Oh. What happened to your hair?”

“Lucerne made me cut it.”

“It looks okay,” said Amanda. Then she said, “They found Burt dumped in the vacant lot, out behind Scales. He had freezer burns.” “He’d been in a freezer?”

“What was left. There were parts missing — liver, kidneys, heart. Zeb says the mobs will sell the parts, then keep the rest in the freezer until they need to send a message.”

“Ren! Where are you?” It was Lucerne, in my room.

“I have to go,” I whispered. I tucked the phone back into the tiger. “In here,” I said. My teeth were chattering. Freezers were so cold.

“What are you doing in the closet, darling?” said Lucerne. “Come and have some lunch! You’ll feel better soon!” She sounded chirpy: the crazier and more disturbed I acted, the better it was for her, because the less anyone would believe me if I told on her.

Her story was that I’d been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with.

40

Once I’d adjusted enough —
adjusted
was the word they used, as if I was a bra strap — Lucerne said I had to go to school because it was bad for me to be moping around the house: I needed to get out and make a whole new life for myself, as she was doing. It was a risk for her — I was a walking cluster bomb, the truth about her might come popping out of my mouth at any time. But she knew I was judging her silently, and that annoyed her, so she really wanted me elsewhere.

Frank seemed to have believed her story, though he didn’t seem to care about it one way or the other. I could see now why Lucerne had run off with Zeb: at least Zeb had noticed her. And he’d noticed me, as well, whereas Frank treated me like a window: he never looked at me, only through me.

Sometimes I dreamed about Zeb. He’d be wearing a bear suit, and the fur would unzip down the middle like a pyjama bag, and Zeb would step out. He’d smell comforting, in the dream — like rained-on grass, and cinnamon, and the salty, vinegary, singed-leaf smell of the Gardeners.

The school was called HelthWyzer High. On the first day I put on one of the new outfits that Lucerne had picked out for me. It was pink and lemon yellow — colours the Gardeners never would have allowed because they’d show the dirt and waste the soap.

My new clothes felt like a disguise. I couldn’t get used to how tight they were compared to my old loose dresses, and how my bare arms stuck out from the sleeves and my bare legs came out from the bottom of the knee-length, pleated skirt. But this was what the girls at HelthWyzer High all wore, according to Lucerne.

“Don’t forget your sunblock, Brenda,” she said as I headed towards the door. She was calling me Brenda now: she claimed it was my real name.

HelthWyzer sent a student to be my guide — walk me to the school, show me around. Her name was Wakulla Price; she was thin, with glossy skin like toffee. She was wearing a pastel yellow top like mine, but she had pants on the bottom. She gazed at my pleated skirt, her eyes wide. “I like your skirt,” she said.

“My mother bought it,” I said.

“Oh,” she said in a
sorry
voice. “My mother bought me one like that two years ago.” So I liked her.

On the way to school, Wakulla said,
What does your dad do, when did you get here,
and so on, but she didn’t mention any cults; and I said,
How do you like the school, who are the teachers,
and that got us safely there. The houses we were passing were all different styles, but with solarskins. They had the latest tech in the Compounds, which Lucerne had pointed out a lot.
Really, Brenda, they’re so much more truly green than those purist Gardeners so you don’t have to worry about how much hot water you’re using, and isn’t it time you took another shower?

The high-school building was sparkling clean — no graffiti, no pieces falling off, no smashed windows. It had a deep green lawn and some shrubs pruned into round balls, and a statue: “Florence Nightingale,” it said on the plaque, “The Lady of the Lamp.” But someone had changed the
a
to a u, so it said The Lady of the Lump.

“Jimmy did that,” said Wakulla. “He’s my lab partner in Nanoforms Biotech, he’s always doing dumb things like that.” She smiled: she had really white teeth. Lucerne had been saying how dingy my own teeth were and I needed a cosmetic dentist. She was already planning to redecorate our entire house, but she had some alterations planned for me as well.

At least I didn’t have any cavities. The Gardeners were against refined sugar products and were strict about brushing, though you had to use a frayed twig because they hated the idea of putting either plastic or animal bristles inside their mouths.

The first morning at that school was very strange. I felt as if the classes were in a foreign language. All the subjects were different, the words were different, and then there were the computers and the paper notebooks. I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find — you couldn’t just wipe it away, not like a slate. I wanted to run into the washroom and wash my hands after touching the keyboards and pages; the danger had surely rubbed off on me.

Lucerne said that our so-called personal history — the forcible abduction and so on — would be kept confidential by the officials at the HelthWyzer Compound. But someone had leaked because the kids at the school all knew. At least they hadn’t heard about Lucerne’s sex-slave lust-mad pervert story. But I knew I’d lie about that if I had to, in order to protect Amanda, and Zeb, and Adam One, and even the ordinary Gardeners. We are all in one another’s hands, Adam One used to say. I was beginning to find out what that meant.

At lunch hour a group gathered around me. Not a mean group, just curious.
So, you lived with a cult? Weird! How crazy were they?
They had a lot of questions. Meanwhile they were eating their lunches, and there was meat smell everywhere. Bacon. Fish sticks, 20 per cent real fish. Burgers — they were called WyzeBurgers, and they were made of meat cultured on stretchy racks. So no animals had actually been killed. But it still smelled like meat. Amanda would’ve eaten the bacon to show she hadn’t been brainwashed by the leaf-eaters, but I couldn’t go that far. I peeled the bun off my WyzeBurger and tried to eat that, but it stank of dead animal.

“Like, how bad was it?” said Wakulla.

“It was just a greenie cult,” I said.

“Like the Wolf Isaiahists,” said one kid. “Were they terrorists?” They all leaned forward: they wanted horror stories.

“No. They were pacifists,” I said. “We had to work on this rooftop garden.” And I told them about the slug and snail relocation. It sounded so strange to me, when I told it.

“At least you didn’t eat them,” said one girl. “Some of those cults, they eat road kill.”

“The Wolf Isaiahists do, for sure. It was on the Web.”

“You lived in the pleebs, though. Cool.” Then I realized I had an edge, because I’d lived in the pleeblands where none of them had ever been except maybe on a school trip, or dragged along with their slumming parents to the Tree of Life. So I could make up whatever I liked.

“You were child labour,” one boy said. “A little enviroserf. Sexy!” They all laughed.

“Jimmy, don’t be so dumb,” said Wakulla. “It’s okay,” she said to me, “he always says stuff like that.”

Jimmy grinned. “Did you worship cabbages?” he went on. “Oh Great Cabbage, I kiss your cabbagey cabbageness!” He went down on one knee and grabbed a handful of my pleated skirt. “Nice leaves, do they come off?”

“Don’t be such a meat-breath,” I said.

“A what?” he said, laughing. “A meat-breath?”

Then I had to explain how that was a harsh name to call someone, among the extreme greens. Like pig-eater. Like slug-face. This made Jimmy laugh more.

I saw the temptation. I saw it clearly. I would come up with more bizarre details about my cultish life, and then I would pretend that I thought all these things were as warped as the HelthWyzer kids did. That would be popular. But also I saw myself the way the Adams and the Eves would see me: with sadness, with disappointment. Adam One, and Toby, and Rebecca. And Pilar, even though she was dead. And even Zeb.

How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. But I knew that already, because of Bernice.

Wakulla walked home with me, and Jimmy came too. He fooled around a lot — made jokes, expected us to laugh — and Wakulla did laugh, in a polite way. I could see that Jimmy had a big crush on her, though Wakulla told me later that she couldn’t see Jimmy in any way other than as a friend.

Wakulla turned off halfway to go to her house, and Jimmy said he’d continue along with me because it was on the way. He was irritating when there was more than one other person: maybe he felt it was better to make a fool of yourself than to have other people do it for you. But when he wasn’t putting on an act he was much nicer. I could tell he was sad underneath, because I was that way myself. We were sort of like twins in that way, or so I felt at the time. He was the first boy I’d ever really had for a friend.

“So, it must be weird for you, being here in a Compound, after the pleeblands,” he said one day.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Was your mom really tied to the bed by a deranged maniac?” Jimmy would come right out with stuff other people might think but would never say.

“Where did you hear that?” I said.

“Locker room,” said Jimmy. So Lucerne’s fable had seeped out.

I took a deep breath. “This is between us, right?”

“Cross my heart,” said Jimmy.

“No,” I said. “She wasn’t tied to the bed.”

“Didn’t think so,” said Jimmy.

“But don’t tell that to anyone. I really trust you not to.”

“I won’t,” said Jimmy. He didn’t say,
Why not.
He knew that if everyone heard Lucerne had been bullshitting, people would know she hadn’t been kidnapped, she’d merely cheated big time. What she’d done had been for love, or just sex. And she was back at HelthWyzer with her loser of a husband because the other guy had tossed her over. But she’d rather die than admit it. Or else she’d rather kill someone.

All this time I was going into my closet and taking the purple cellphone out of my tiger and phoning Amanda. We’d text each other with the best times to call, and if the connection was good we could see each other onscreen. I asked a lot of questions about the Gardeners. Amanda told me she wasn’t staying with Zeb any more — Adam One said she was almost grown up so she had to sleep in one of the singles cubicles, and that was pretty boring. “When can you get back here?” she said. But I didn’t know how I could manage to run away from HelthWyzer.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

The next time we were on the phone she said, “Look who’s here,” and it was Shackie, grinning at me sheepishly, and I wondered if they’d been having sex together. I felt as if Amanda had scooped some glittery piece of junk I wanted for myself, but that was stupid because I had no feelings for Shackie whatsoever. I did wonder whether it had been his hand on my bum, that night I passed out in the holospinner. But most likely it was Croze.

“How’s Croze?” I said to Shackie. “And Oates?”

“They’re fine,” Shackie mumbled. “When’re you coming back? Croze really misses you! Gang, right?”

“Grene,” I said. “Gangrene.” I was surprised he’d still use that old kidstuff password, but maybe Amanda had put him up to it so I’d feel included.

After Shackie went offscreen, Amanda said they were partners — the two of them were boosting things from malls. But it was a fair trade: she got someone watching her back and helping her lift stuff and sell it, and he got sex.

“Don’t you love him?” I said.

Amanda said I was a romantic. She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.