Black Juice (16 page)

The girl-bird came down out of the tree. She got busy at one side, pretending to look for food, and then she stepped casually onto the dance-floor, as if she’d just happened by.

He was thrilled. The noises stopped, and the tail shone and shook and spread, and dipped this way and that. He was trying so hard, my throat opened and closed in little silent moans of effort for him.

Fl’hup!
, and she was gone. His tail swiftly folded and he was after her.

We listened for a few minutes. The bush had come alive with the beginnings of a breeze, and leaves tinkled down from the invisible heights.

Then Grandma looked at me. ‘A good show, yes?’

I
N THE CHURCH THE NEIGHBOUR
, Irini, was keeping vigil. I’d heard about but never met her; here she was, yellowskinned, glossy dark-haired and martyred-looking. She sat to one side of the four candles in their square; among them, my Grandma was swaddled in knotted crimson synthetic bands, with a small cream-coloured mask inset. As I sat myself next to my mother in the first-but-one pew, I realised with a shock that this mask was Grandma’s face, sculpted by God and by genes, shrunken to dolllikeness by time.
How she’s shrunken!
I nearly whispered to Mum, until I saw her spotted hand in the clutches of Auntie Pruitt’s.

The priest when he came in was offensively padded and protected. His electronics and goggles gave him a manufactured and unreadable face. He was athletic and young; he moved as if he’d never lost anyone, never known ill-health in any form.

The church itself was long uncleaned, only opened for this small occasion and no effort made for it.
No flowers
, Mum had said, so there were only cold, flat cheques sent to one of Grandma’s charities (not from me—I couldn’t afford that, though I might have afforded flowers), and here, on the
day, saints with chipped noses shedding blessing on us from their grimy fingers. The priest’s words were tinny and indistinct through his filter, and I sat after a while and watched the patterns the grit made, eddying around the floor, watched the nose-point of Grandma’s little pinched face, so white.

Mother and Auntie Pruitt clutched to each other very hard and subdued. Did they go shopping especially for those matching outfits? I became preoccupied with glancing at them undetected, picking the differences in the cargo pants (it was in the tabs and the pocket placement) and the shirts (Pruitt’s tartan had a thread of gold, my mother’s was plain and more pilled).

‘Eternal
sumth
grant unto her, oh
loggdg
…’ squeaked the priest with bossy finality.

‘And let perpetual light shine upon her,’ we murmured.

Irini blew her nose, loudly. I was blinking a lot by now against the stinging in my eyes, and the skin under my arms, behind my knees, inside my elbows, was beginning to feel fat and welty and irritated. Grandma lay like a bound stone, radiating some kind of meaning I wouldn’t be able to appreciate today. I was too itchy and angry and ill.

And then it was over, the whole dull, music-free, flowerless affair. The four of us—Irini, me, Mum and Pruitt—each took the end of a swaddling-band, and we carried Grandma out after the priest. He walked slightly too fast, but we let him go rocketing off. Grandma followed slowly,
evenly, floatingly along like an airship, like a seriously injured body, properly cradled.

We laid her on the footpath outside the church gate. Blown twigs, grit and old dark brown dead leaves brought the pavement alive, around her utter stillness. The hearse, a grey banger from the days of the Epidemics, slid up to the kerb.

Mum and Auntie Pruitt stood back, shirts flapping, loose hair lashing about, faces red-mottled with the wind and with weeping. Irini was neater, her hair tucked up under a firmly pinned hat, a folded hankie pressed to her nose. She was the only one of us in skirt and stockings; she would pay for that tomorrow—didn’t she know how much cortisone cream was? And she’d get no Compassionate Allowance, not being related
at all
.

‘I can’t quite believe it,’ Mum wobbled, and Pruitt took her elbow in both hands, and looked intense. Grandma’s face was already grit-speckled, and leaves were caught in the swaddling. If we left her there a little while, she would bury herself.

Irini performed the final part for all of us: stepped forward, knelt on the pavement and, holding her skirt decent in the wind, bent and kissed Grandma’s forehead. It seemed only right—she was the one who knew Grandma best, these last days. It’s the role of daughters to move ever away from their mothers (and could there be greater distance than between those two sighing snaky-haired lumberjacks of women and this close-wrapped, completed object at our feet?)
and it’s likely, isn’t it, that someone will step in, and appreciate everything the daughters can’t, being so busy pushing themselves out into the world, saying,
No, no, I’m not you
.

The priest said his few words to Mum and Auntie, stranger to strangers. He was in the Lambda before you could say
condolences
. He drew away slowly, but you could hear the relief in the engine revs as he rounded the corner onto the highway.

W
E WERE WALKING BACK FROM A DAY AT THE LAKE
, toiling slowly along the dirt road up the last long rise to Grandma’s turn-off. In a few more steps the late sun would be blazing in our eyes—the rise was topped with a pink-gold fur of grass; the road cut a bright, straggling hole through the slim black trees.

Into that arbour a man strolled, up from the far side of the rise. I thought he was wearing a plumed costume. I wasn’t surprised; I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything that walked out of the landscape at Grandma’s—the place was full of wonders. But as he came down the hill I saw that he was quite an ordinary man. His hat was a beloved worn hat, grown fast to his head, but his boilersuit and boots were the dark-blue Meeko-system standard.

At his waist he wore a special belt with quantities of bunched feathers strung along it, swinging. The sunlight behind him filled the bunches with needles of light, and made the main curves shine like polished blades, and glowed in the
frothier feathers. That delicious rustling, of soft live metal, whispered at us as he neared us.

‘Good evening to you!’ Grandma said in her uphill voice. ‘Evening.’

Grandma stopped. ‘Do you have birds there, or only feathers?’

‘Oh no, I’ve got whole birds.’ He lifted an armful of glitter. The small grey bodies hung beneath. Some were undamaged; others were part-devoured or crushed, the feathers matted with oil or blood; one was just the root of the tail, with the fine metal leg structure, the kera-plas claw-tips stripped of their paint.

I wanted to reach in and touch, make the leg bend with my finger, but I sensed Grandma’s silence. She had drawn back in the stiffest disapproval, her whiskery mouth pursed. ‘The child doesn’t need to see that,’ she said sharply.

The man dropped the tails over the bodies, and smiled down at me. ‘They can get pretty banged up, out here in the bush. Every so often we go round and collect ’em all up, make ’em pretty again, and put them back out all fresh.’

Grandma drew in her breath to speak, but he said to her, ‘I’ve always believed in giving it to ’em straight, little kids.’

‘Well!’

‘Yeah. Best to let ’em see things as they are. They can take it.’

‘Oh, you
think
so,’ said Grandma.

He winked at me and walked on past us, down the road,
his flounced bird-skirt setting up its fine rustling. I turned to watch him.

‘Come along, Daphne,’ said Grandma up ahead.

I caught up with her and we topped the hill into the full orange blast of the sunset.

‘Those people aren’t meant to be
seen
,’ she puffed. ‘Not by residents, not once induction’s complete. I shall write a letter to management.’

‘Why? What would management do?’

‘Put him in his place, I hope. Out of sight.’

I looked back down the hill. He already was out of sight. The white road was empty, slipping away into the dusky bush.

‘T
HAT CLOUD’S THICKENING
,’ said Irini, peering out the Old Girl’s windscreen.

I didn’t answer. I felt ratty. Mum and Pruitt together always made me feel ratty, even without Greville’s pollutants and my usual overreaction to the injections. And now I had to ferry Irini home. Mum and Pruitt had only paid to
bring
Grandma to Greville. They hadn’t bought Irini a return trip.

Well, we knew you’d be going that way anyway, darling
, said Pruitt.

It just would’ve been nice for someone to tell me
, I’d muttered. Ahead
of time
.

You’ll be fine. She’s a nice old thing
.

Pruitt was already light on her feet anticipating the trip
home, the music, the
communing
. They spoke their own language together, those two. They might look like sides of beef, but they gushed at each other like Victorian spinster poets. If we’d all lived in the same town, and all come out together as a funeral party should—as blood relations, most of us—I’d be throwing up by now, having listened to that all the way.

As it was, my eyes were swelling and my nose was bunged up, and I had a lot of blowing to do and a few pills to take when I got into the Old Girl. Then, ‘That cloud’s thickening,’ said Irini, and soon we were flying down the highway through the middle of the grey blow.

I did talk with Irini—about Grandma’s sweetness in her old age, about how frequently she reminisced about her time with me in the Meeko-system, about how the world has changed, about how death takes all of us one way or another—that hasn’t changed, we haven’t managed to mess up that system, have we! When her talk faded and her head began to loll, I pulled over, inflated the travel pillow and settled it round her neck. ‘Oh thank you, dear,’ she murmured from inside a fraying dream. ‘Very kind.’

It was lonelier than driving alone, driving sleeping-Irini. It was midafternoon, but I had to switch the headlights on to find the road. It was like driving down the eye of a tornado, its rings shifting over us, charcoal, dirty cream, mid-grey. The Old Girl’s seals weren’t great, despite what I’d told Nerida. The finer dust was filtering in, powdering Irini’s navy skirt,
tickling my sensitive nose. Nerida would have me on the Brassica drops for months after this. Under Irini’s seat, the WundaVerm would be speckled black. Would toxins leach into the mixture and kill off the plants before they started? Or would I drop Irini off, and toil home, and take the tray inside, and put it under the Gazlight, and see, just like in the old documentaries, the first pearly stalk unbend its elbow, wander lightwards, and spread its small green hand? Would they all twelve prove viable, their stalks strengthening, their greenness emerging, thickening, bunching, seemingly out of nothing and for no reason, vibrating slightly in their rows?

I
WOULDN’T SAY
H
ARROW’S SON WAS HANDSOME
—not handsome that people would notice. He’s got a handsomeness that only I can see, so only I watch him. Even he himself doesn’t know about it yet, so he doesn’t preen, like some of the finer town-kids do.

He’s right below me, skinning munkees. With their fur peeled off, they look like shiny wet people, but longer and thinner. And smaller, of course. He hooks the peeled ones over a branch-stump, lower down my tree. There are too many for him and his dad to use; they must be going to market.

I could reach down and touch his scumbly hair, with the little bits dried and goldened by the summer. That would freak him, wouldn’t it?—well and truly. One second he’s quickly slitting munkee-skin, the next he’s eye to eye with nutty me, as good as touched by yowlinins himself. I wouldn’t do that to him. Heck, I wouldn’t do that to
me
. Where would I come, these long days? How would I pass my time?

He’s grumbling under his breath; none of these kids knows how good they’ve got it. A dad to order you around (a mam, too, most of them); school to go to; a house to provide for; a plough to pull to save your old man’s plough-busted back. Days made, hours filled—to have a duty is a wonderful thing. They should try going without for a week or two; they’d scuttle back to whisk-brooming and munkee-cleaning fast enough. These kids don’t know how long a day can be.

He goes off to get a sack. The munkees hang there as if they expect a spanking, their skinny backs pink, veined purple. I could pinch one (they make a good pot), but I don’t do that kind of thing now. It’s weird, how my days of mischief just ended. Except, only I know they did; everyone else still thinks I’m out for trouble, whatever I do. I get shooed off places I never even bothered when I
was
bad.

Skit, girl, skit you! Get your yowlinin-paws off my stall!

But I’m not! I’m only looking—

Get gone. No one buys when you’re hanging around like a smell
.

Here he comes. My, he looks cross, funny boy. Puts away the munkees and ties the bag. He’s got nice hands that know what they’re doing. Man hands, but on a boy body. Takes away the sack, comes back, takes the skins off to the house for stretching.

Now it’s quiet, but for flies zooming to the drops of munkee-blood. Well, that was good, a good long look. I won’t get another like that for a while. I turn over and lounge along
the branch. Through the leaves there’s a sky bright as scrubbed blue-ware. There’s enough wind for his dad’s corn crop to go shushing, shushing, like a mam over her babies when yowlinins is loose.

I lie there until they go, with their little handcart of earlycorn and munkees. I could go in their house; the dog knows me, and lets me. But there’d be nothing new—I was only there a little while ago. I’ve got the smell of him in my memory and I don’t need to lie on his bed to call it up.

I get down and cut through the corn, to the road. I sit among the stalks, a little way in, so I don’t show. I wait and watch.

Here they come. This is the way the world will see him; look how his frown goes and he straightens, as he gets closer to town. If I were a town-girl, his spirit might be lifting for me. I did dream that, once. But when I woke up I was the old touched, unlucky one again, hardly better than munkee myself.