Days Like This (30 page)

Often through the night when Daniel woke in pain, Kieran got to him first, massaging his limbs to encourage the sluggish circulation. And it was often Kieran who hauled Daniel up and tried to get him to shift his legs or lift his head upright. Kieran got Peter to make Daniel a wooden walking frame so Daniel could try and balance himself and push one foot in front of the other. And it was often Kieran there encouraging Daniel when he cried out in pain and frustration.

Daniel persuaded Kieran to take him out into the cave every day, practically lugging him along the walls where the other floaters were.

‘What d’you reckon?’ Daniel would call out to them. ‘Am I ready to run a marathon? Am I ready for rollerblading? Rhythmic gymnastics? Okay, then, knitting?’

He made them laugh and Lily noticed that some of them were trying as well, even just lifting up an arm or bending a knee.

‘I’ll have them doing cartwheels before they know it,’ Daniel would gasp when he lay back down in his space, but Lily could see how much the physical exertion cost him. If she said anything to him about overdoing it, as Rosemary sometimes would, Daniel would shake his head gently.

‘Remember, Lily, we
will
overcome the Wall,’ he’d say softly.

In Kieran, Lily found enough compassion, enough love, to balance what she’d lost. His unconditional care helped her adapt to the changes that had inundated her life as completely as the water.

‘I want to be with you forever,’ he told her one day. ‘I love you, Lily.’

‘I love you too, Kieran.’

At Kieran’s urging, she moved her meagre belongings into his room. That he was the very last person she saw before she slept and the very first person when she woke was precious beyond belief. He had reached out through her long silent years, drawing her as close as one person could be to another. Lily felt as safe with him as he felt with her. And Daniel was in the next alcove. It was all Lily could ask for.

One by one, those among the injured who had taken serum died. As had happened to Meredith and to the girl Chrissie, the years rushed through them so that they aged rapidly. Many went mad with this knowledge and had to be sedated until they slipped away. But with others, the community witnessed the strangest thing. As the effects of the serum decreased, it was as if, released from the burden of perfection, they woke from the longest dream.

Probably because of her own mother and Meredith, Lily was drawn to these people, and to one woman in particular, whom Lily and Kieran had found wandering in the rubble. Lily didn’t know where she had come from. And the woman couldn’t tell her because her mind was dishevelled and she could barely speak, let alone remember her own name. She was emaciated, weak, cut and bruised, and both of her legs were damaged. She had a little book tied to her wrist in a waterproof bag which she had managed to save and carried like a beloved child.

When Lily and Kieran found her, she had already begun to age. She was one of the survivors whose mind was blurred, but there were moments when the light came through, and she looked at Lily as if she were beginning to remember. Lily brought Daniel to sit with her. In a strange way, this woman reminded them of Megan, of what might have been had their mother survived.

Of course, the speed of the woman’s decline was awful to observe. She would die soon, but at least she had been freed from her false youth. The absence of drugs and serum loosened the inflexible wiring of her brain and there were traces of the person she must have once been. Her name was Ruby. They only knew this because it was written at the front of the little book she had carried out of the devastation; her diary.

Nobody claimed her. She was completely alone and so Lily, Daniel and Kieran became her temporary family. Ruby loved to be massaged because it eased the pain of her rapid ageing and it seemed to help her remember happier times. So they massaged her daily; smoothing her poor, diminishing body and brushing her thinning hair.

‘I used to love food,’ she said in her papery voice. ‘I loved making it and feeling it and smelling it. Like dough for bread, all smooth under my hands. I loved the smell of roasting meat and garlic and rosemary and the crunch of potatoes.’ She shivered with pleasure.

But there were times when Ruby couldn’t be soothed and they could only sit with her and listen as her voice quavered and rose.

‘What happened to me?’ she’d cry out. ‘I lost my joy and there was no more passion. The only thing that made me happy was my new body.’

At times like this she’d grab Lily or Daniel or Kieran’s hand. There were also rare lucid moments. ‘When I changed,’ she’d say, ‘I longed for things, but I didn’t know what they were. I remembered when I loved with all my heart, but I couldn’t remember what that meant. I tried to get it back. Sometimes I thought that if I could just remember. If I could maybe recite something comforting, that would help. I remembered things my mother told me, that I didn’t even fully understand but they still made me happy and I would begin:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name
… But then I’d have to stop because I couldn’t remember any more.’

Ruby’s hands would often go to the diary.

‘This reminded me,’ she said, untying the bag. ‘This precious thing, my diary.’

She smoothed her hands over it’s cover, running her fingers over the little bumps and divots in the leather. ‘Like tree bark, rough but beautiful. I remembered that. And here, look.’

Every day she did this, opening the diary at the first page. ‘My name – Ruby W Sheldon, do you see? And other things helped me remember, like this.’

She opened the book to a page with a little note pasted in. Lily read,
‘To darling Mummy, I wish you the happiest Mother’s Day in the whole wide world; from Minnie.’
There were lines and lines of hugs and kisses, a huge butterfly over the ‘i’ of Minnie and red glitter attached to the edges of the note. Some of that glitter fell onto Ruby’s hands. Ruby stared at the glitter, tears sliding down her face so Lily, not for the first time, had to console her.

‘Look, Ruby, look.’ Hastily, Lily opened the diary to a well-thumbed page and began to read, ‘Listen, this is what you wrote, “
Minnie made me laugh today when I told her off for talking too much and not eating her food. She looked at me with her huge brown eyes and said, ‘No, Mumma, Minnie not talk, Minnie’s lips talk.
’ ” ’

Lily looked up.

‘Yes, I remember,’ Ruby said softly. ‘I do remember now.’

Like Ruby, many of those who were ageing and dying spoke of the children they’d lost or had given away, and of their partners and parents, their nieces and nephews, cousins and aunts, uncles and grandparents, and of those that had gone before, spinning their history again into a world which for a while had forgotten it’self completely.

It was as if an entire time had been wiped clean, as if children had disappeared off the face of the earth; as if parents had been outcast and their families annihilated. Perhaps because of this, the survivors who remembered often spoke of place, recreating the houses and the city of their childhoods before the Committee had come and the Wall had gone up.

And, like Ruby, there was rawness in the way they remembered. Those who had given away their children found it hard to understand how this had been possible. A few stayed confused and alienated and were difficult to console.

There were few reunions. Those who’d staggered from the wreckage of the past into this new simpler life rarely found people they recognised. This made Lily’s survival and Daniel’s even more amazing.

Six months later

The water that had rushed into all their lives had brought great pain, but also it’s own kind of joy. It had scoured away the worst of the past.

Survivors made their way to Sydney from the countryside north and south of the city. They dramatically boosted numbers in the Sydney basin where dozens of communities sprang up on the flatlands between the ruined city and the mountains. Peter introduced a ritual for those who came to their cave system. Each survivor was asked to stand on the rock platform and tell their story.

Many sobbed as they recounted how the waves had annihilated their communities, how they had survived, miraculously, when thousands had perished.

To maintain order, the various communities eventually elected a group to govern, drawn from the established communities existing on the plains around Sydney. Peter and Rosemary were chosen from the cave system to serve on this inaugural governing executive. The executive’s most immediate task was to organise crop planting as well as monitoring the food collection and rationing processes until the first crops came in. As well, they directed the collection of energy, specifically the salvage and connection of solar panels and the construction of wind farms and wave power facilities.

They organised people to help sink wells designed to tap the aquifers unaffected by the inundation of seawater. They also arranged the building of temporary crèches and preschools until more permanent structures could be assembled. Only a few children had survived, but they, plus babies born into this post-Wall world, were a vital part of the new society.

The waterlogged land directly surrounding Sydney was ruined. Nothing would grow where the sea had saturated the soil. It would have to be given time to heal. But beyond that desolation, between what once was and what would be, people were building their new homes, using the tumbledown bricks, the shattered tiles, the scattered iron and wood.

As more people poured in, some of the old cave community chose to leave to build homes on the plains. But many, including Lily and Kieran, Daniel, Rosemary, Peter, Ingie and Merrick, remained. They had grown attached to the cool freshness of the air, the abundant sweet water and, most importantly, the people they now considered to be friends and family.

Rebuilding was slow and people were often hungry, but for the moment, they were alive, eager to cooperate and free of the oppression of the past.

One afternoon, a number of months after the tsunami, Lily was working with Rosemary in the medicinal plant garden at the edge of the gully, planting and weeding. The garden was full of radish and cabbage, wild carrot, hibiscus, nasturtium and common bean, alfalfa, St. John’s wort, quinoa, spirulina and celery. Lily always enjoyed this time with Rosemary, but today she was restless, anxious to return to the cave and Kieran. He had come in before her and was resting.

‘How was your day, Lilla?’ he smiled, shifting on the bed so she could join him.

‘Momentous,’ she said.

‘Oh?’

‘You know how Dan and I always talk about looking ahead, accepting the past?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Kieran raised an eyebrow, rolling onto his side and propping himself up on his elbow.

‘Kieran,’ she paused, bursting with the news. ‘I can tell you now I know for sure. We’re going to have a baby!’

‘A baby?’ he repeated, stunned.

‘Yes. Our baby,’ she laughed with joy.

In that moment, delighted at his reaction, everything that had been dark and cruel in Lily’s life fell away. This child, their child, would receive the precious gift of love from it’s parents, from Daniel and from the whole community. Lily’s silent years were gone and she was home at last.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alison Stewart has lived in Sydney for more than 30 years after growing up in South Africa. Her first book for adults,
Born into the Country
, was shortlisted for South Africa’s AA Mutual Life Vita Young Writers’ Award. One of her young adult books,
The Wishing Moon
, was shortlisted for the Australian Multicultural Children’s Award and was a Children’s Book Council Notable book. A manuscript about her childhood,
Cold Stone Soup
, was a runner-up in the 2010 Penguin/Varuna Scholarship. She has written nine novels, seven for young people and two for adults. She also worked for many years as a newspaper journalist. Alison is married to
Sydney Morning Herald
journalist Rob Mills and they have two adult children, Georgia and Angus.

The idea for
Days Like This
came from Alison’s growing unease about our diminishing natural resources, combined with the rise of a heartless individuality. The book explores the consequences – a world where people are shockingly exploited to serve the desires of an elite few.
Days Like This
was a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.