By Light Alone (26 page)

‘I will tell you something interesting about strawberries,’ Rodion announced. The girls hunkered down, eating the creamy chill paste with their tongues only, it seemed: for nothing seemed to go into their stomachs. ‘People think that the fruit eaten in the garden of Eden, eaten by Adam and Eve, was an apple. But not so!’

And Marthe was already bored. Nothing is so boring as the stuff you don’t comprehend. ‘What’s Eden?’

‘Oh don’t you know
anything
?’ Leah asked, who at least knew this.

‘I know Adam’s the dude in the Deep Sea Battle books,’ Marthe replied, defiantly.

‘Did you never hear the story of the Garden of Eden?’ the old man, Rodion, asked, in a mild voice.

‘Never did never will,’ replied Marthe, leaping up. ‘Later, oldster.’ And she was off.

‘
I’ve
heard of the Garden of Eden – and the apple,’ Leah assured Rodion.

‘But that’s exactly it,’ said Rodion, looking about him with a vaguely baffled air. ‘It was no apple. It was a strawberry. It says so, in the Bible.’

‘Strawberry in the Bible, got it,’ said Leah, hopping to her feet. ‘Got to find my
friend
now.’ And she ran after Leah, singing with delight.

‘In the heeb,’ Rodion hooted mournfully at their retreating figures. ‘Rue!’

Whatever street
that
was. But Rodion was all right, and what’s more he was always there: the same bland, blithe friendliness, the same distractedly cheerful manner. He offered Leah another strawberry ice cream the next time she was in the park – just her, this time, and her new carer, Josephina. ‘Are you one of those pie-doughs we’re warned about?’ she asked him.

‘Gracious
no
.’ He looked actually shocked.

‘A pie-dough would say no, though.’

‘But so would an honest man.’

Of course, that was true. ‘They say in school that pie-doughs are everywhere, and want to get their grubby hands on little children. Little girls especially.’

‘Not I. And anyway, your carer is right there.’

‘Oh
her
? She’s a sullen beast. She doesn’t like being a carer at all. I don’t know why she doesn’t go off and do something else with her lifestyle and being-in-the-world.’

‘Perhaps there’s nothing else for her to do? Perhaps she has no choice?’

‘Well
I
don’t know, do I?’ Leah retorted.

‘You could ask her?’

Leah considered this. ‘If she were proper poor, I could talk to her. Or if she were rich, obviously I could. But she’s a kind of inbetween, and I don’t talk to
those
.’

‘What do you mean, proper poor?’

‘I mean like the people in my village.’

‘Interesting that you call it
your
village!’ Rodion smiled at her.

‘It’s not like I’m pretending I own it,’ Leah said. ‘Anyway, it hardly matters. Daddy came and pulled me out of
there
. Where’s my ice cream, though?’

They went to get the ice cream.

Leah could hardly go tell Oldion Rodion that her parents were splitting up. That would be sadder than the saddest.

And in the event, the break-up was smoother
than
smooth. Dad moved into a stony flat in the Seawall apartment building overlooking the Hudson, and Ma moved to a house on First Street, and – well, Leah had no idea what happened to the old house. Maybe they sold it, or maybe it just sat in darkness, the windows turned to black, the carpet bots making curlicues in the dust, and at the heart of it all the fridge, the enormous fridge – still (though this made no sense) packed with every kind of food, and murmuring to itself all day and all night with its voice like a housefly’s buzz. The god of the house’s peculiar, New World
plenitude
of silence. The Fri. The Idge.

At any rate, Leah never went back to that house.

Her time, now, was divided between Ma and Dad. Schooling went on – though Marthe’s parents moved to one of the New Zealand islands (the one with the big siege wall all about it, like one of those collars with which they neck sick dogs – can’t remember the name of the island right now). They still stayed in touch, of course. Most everybody had Lance, now; it wasn’t just for special occasions. And Leah made other friends, like Freda and Lucy, and she kept on seeing old Rodion. She and Rodion had an ice-cream date every fortnight, in the park, and never missed it. Dividing her life between Ma and Dad became the larger rhythm of her life, and soon felt as natural as day-night or the swap of seasons.

She liked the interchange the best, when the flitter collected her from First, or from the Seawall, and hoiked her up into the sky. She liked to look down and see the city modelled, transformed into a bristling art-installation on the topic of Plenty. The rectangular green gap in the middle, and all around it, like a cluttered formation of crystals and basalts, an artificial giant’s causeway, pink and cream and grey. It was the Fridge, made stone. It was the Fridge laid on its side with the door removed, and all the bursting, thrusting fullness solidified into something permanent. Her insides would spangle, and the little hairs on her neck wriggle like the seeds in the book about the big peach. The waters would shimmer, and the antique bridges gleam, the suspension wires taut like bowstrings. And then the flitter would swoop and she would be deposited, with Adrianna, her new carer, Adrianna of the open mouth, who would puff and gasp as she manhandled Leah’s case out of the trunk.

Switch off the screen and what have you got? The huge white door. No images moving upon it any more. Only the great block of blank door, like a monolith of milk ice cream. My god it’s full of – food? Is it? Stars, is it?

Stars. Food.

Towards the end of the year she became aware of a generalized
pressure
, in a psychodynamic sense of the word. It had to do with the imminent embarrassment that she might have to spend
another
year learning, like a mong, like a kaka, like the
poor
have to, because they can’t afford the braingeneering. But it was all all right. She had a sit-down talk with Mama – she always had more sensible conversations with Mama – about her age of majority. It was one of those ‘as you know’ chats. ‘As you know, Leah, it’s a privilege of wealth to be able to attain legal adulthood at fourteen.’ Leah didn’t know anything of the sort, but knew better than to say so. ‘This is not an automatic thing, of course,’ Mama was saying. ‘It is that a child of means is able to mature more quickly. And your time in – the thing that happened to you – took a chunk out of your schooling.’

Leah contemplated this phrase: the thing that happened to you. ‘Papusza says that there’s a new tweak . . .’

‘Now, my darling,’ said Marie. ‘We don’t need to rush after any strange new treatments. Your tutor says you’re very quick – that you’re making very quick progress.’

‘Sure,’ said Leah.

Papusza was her new best friend.

Mama was doing more and more of her gardening work. She loved gardens, Leah knew, although Leah couldn’t imagine why. The city was a work of art, as far as Leah could see. Gardens were just smartified wildernesses, and she’d seen enough wilderness and weeds and scrub in her life to last her for ever. But she tried saying this to Mama once, and got snapped and snarled down. Queens was more than a wilderness.

They went for a holiday to New Seattle. Everybody agreed – all of Leah’s friends, anyhow – that holidays in the tropics were totally
over
. It was uncool, all the swarming poor with their long black hair, clustering on the beaches like a beard of bees. The resorts were cleared of them by security, of course, except for those few vetted for work as, you know, waiters and that. But you saw them as you flew over. Papusza made an ‘eew’ sound that was higher-pitched than you would
believe
. It was almost up where only dogs could hear it, oh my
god
. Leah had never before in her whole entire life laughed as much as she did with Papusza. And Mama and Papusza’s two dads got on, so they all went to New Seattle together for a holiday. If George could have come it would have been even better. Not that it was bad, of course.

‘Come over here Lee,’ Papusza cried, from the right side of the flitter.

They were all in Wasj’s private flitter, double trunk, with its own shower and fridge and everything. Leah rushed to the right side and looked down. The flight path was north over the ocean, and all the little dints and wavelets in the water were carved in light. It was easy to make out the old coastline – the land north of SF, this would have been once, where the sea had encroached deepest.
Under
the water, roads and houses and dead tree stems like the piles for vanished piers, all clearly visible. The new coastline was, variously, gentle upslopes and sharp ravines where waves ground themselves into a froth, but in either case the landscape was dotted, or crowded, or
teeming
with longhairs. God they were everywhere! Mrs Ficowski said you weren’t to call them longhairs, because that betrayed a vulgarity of condescension, or something. But that’s what they
were
! They just milled about, or lay there, or sat in groups, or fought with one another, or kissed and cuddled and pornoed together, and Papusza made her ‘eeew’ noise again, and Leah shrieked with laughter, until one of Pap’s dads told them to shush with the banshee stuff. They flew past stretches of new coast that were properly fenced off, where real people had their houses and gardens and so on; but the longhairs had no respect for fences. As they went by Leah counted three estates where the fences had been breached, and where longhairs were scattered about the property, eating the flowers, or just laying about. What could you do? There were so many of them.

The fatter of Pap’s two dads came over to the window to see what they were making so much noise about. ‘They come up from So-Cal and
Mec
-hico,’ he said. ‘Lord knows why. It’s not as if there’s more sun up here. Less, rather.’

‘They should make the fence between America and the South stronger,’ said Papusza, imperiously.

‘They come in waves,’ said Pap’s dad. ‘It’s to do with religious sects. I’ve also heard it’s drugs, there’s proponents of both explanations. But anyway, a great mob of them gathers, time-to-time, and they just bust through. Provided they have water the desert’s no barrier to them. On the contrary. All the sun in that desert? Desert’s a restaurant to
that
lot.’

‘We should,’ said Leah, excitedly, rubbing her own close-cropped scalp unconsciously, ‘block the sun for a few months! Put up a space filter – I saw a book about, about it, science fiction it was. You put it in space directly between the Earth and the sun, and stop all sunlight for a few months, and clear them all out.’

‘You come up with the
most
idiotic ideas,’ snapped Mama from the other side of the flitter.

But Pap’s dad chuckled at Leah’s idea, actually
laughed
! So it can’t have been a bad one. And as he laughed the fat on his neck trembled like a rapid pulse. ‘It’s sure a radical solution,’ he said.

‘They’re weeds,’ called Pap’s other dad across the aisle of the flitter. ‘Poisonous weeds. And that’s all there is to say about them.’

‘You quiet your Nazi noise, Tishani,’ said the first dad, and laughed again.

‘I know it seems like the problem is a long way off when you’re in New York, kids,’ said Tishani, addressing the two girls. ‘But it’s getting worse. It’s worse because the authorities won’t seize the nettle. These longhairs come over with guns you know. They’re like cockroaches, real hard to kill, and mean as hell.’

Ez, who had been immersed in his game, perked up at the mention of guns. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Do they send in the militia?’ God he loved
guns
, that boy.

‘They did that two years ago,’ said Tishani. ‘There was a mob assault on the LA fence.’

‘Did they send in the Striders?’ Ez asked, growing more excited.

‘The kit, the caboodle, the lot,’ said Tishani. ‘Men, robots, the whole lot. It was a mass–a–
cre
.’

‘Cool!’

‘I never heard of it,’ said Mama, crossly, from the back of the flitter.

‘It was all over the news,’ said Tishani. ‘But who watches the news?’

Leah wasn’t stupid. She knew nobody cool watched the news, because it was all vulgar nonsense. And she knew that if she’d said: ‘My dad watches the news’ it would have made Mama angry. So she held her peace, and looked out the window again. The crowds of poor became sparser the further north they went. Of course they did. The further north you went, the less sunlight there was – everybody knew that.

Secretly, Leah wished she could watch the news too. Just to find out what was going on. She could watch on her Fwn, of course; or on the house screen when nobody else was about, but then Mama would see it on her records, and she’d get into trouble.

‘If you blotted the sun out,’ Papusza said to her, ‘you’d kill all the crops. Fruit trees and so on.’

‘I guess.’

‘Maybe your science-fiction book hadn’t thought it all through?’

‘I guess not.’

Pap sounded very complacent and wise and clever-old-crone-y as she added: ‘It’s all interconnected, you see. You can’t just snip out one section. It’s all part of a complicated interconnectedness.’