By Light Alone (27 page)

Oh, they had a
great
week in New Seattle. They were in a house and all around were fields of grass; red and yellow and pink and green. Pap and Leah used to lie down between the long stems, their arms around one another, and listen to the noises made by the breeze. Like the whole world was trying to whisper something to them. They played games, and ran about, and saw real live livestock and real live wildlife, and pretended to fight one another. She never laughed so much in all her life before.

Mama took samples of these new grasses with a handheld device. It had something to do with her Queens’ garden. Sometimes Leah tried asking her about all the gardening she was doing now, since the break-up with Dad, but if she tried to ask Mama generally snapped at her. About her nose. Which is to say, nosiness. She seemed to get pretty angry, these days. That was the truth of it.

She was pretty sad when the week had to end, and that’s the truth.

Back in NY she introduced Papusza to Rodion. ‘My good God he’s
old
,’ Pap shrieked, right there, right in front of him. It was, like, the
rudest
thing.

But Rodion only chuckled. ‘Ice cream, ladies?’

‘Ice cream is for tiny kids,’ said Pap, grandly. ‘I want a coffee. Are you more than a hundred?’

‘I am,’ said Rodion, getting slowly to his feet and curling his book into a scroll.

‘Are you more than
two
hundred?’

‘I am not. Would you like a coffee, too, Leah?’

And this was a dilemma. Coffee always made Leah think of the village; the Big Man had always had a cup of coffee in his hand, so far as Leah remembered. When she made a mental picture of him, in her head, there he was, holding the little cup of pungent-smelling black liquid. It looked like hot tar, and the tiny cup might just as well have been carved from stone. The Big Man would be sat there, in one of the rooms of his enormous house (though it was hardly enormous by
actual
standards; it was only enormous by the village standards, and that wasn’t saying very much), and he’d open his mouth in that big croco manner he had, and he’d be holding his coffee cup in his right hand, or else perhaps he’d be balancing it on his spherical belly. Little wisps of steam would be coming up out of it, like threads. Aga H. preferred Shabine, but mostly he liked having both of them there. ‘You know why I like you girls?’ he said, once. ‘You don’t pester me for food.’ Leah’s job had been to hold the Big Man’s big belly out of the way, so Shabine could work properly, and it used to make her
arms
ache. It really was a large mass of flesh. It didn’t seem part of a human being, somehow; it felt like a water-filled piece of furniture – like a mattress. ‘Grown women are lovely,’ the Big Man had sighed, fitting his words into Shabine’s rhythm. ‘But they always have an
agenda
. Food, food, always food. Hoarders. They want to. Have babies. So it’s food, Aga, please, food. Oh they’ll do what I
want
. They’ll do things you
can’t
. Oh, uh, uh. How I get sick of the nagging!’ At this point Shabine disengaged her mouth and put her head round the side of his belly: ‘Oh I’d love to try some
food
, Aga, can I?’ ‘Hey!’ he boomed. ‘I didn’t tell you to stop, did I?’ ‘I’ve never tried any
food
,’ Shabine had insisted. ‘I’ve love to try some sugar! Could I?’ But the Aga had smacked her on the top of her head with the flat of his hand. ‘Get back to your work, kid! What do you want food for? You can’t have babies for years yet.’ There were tears in her eyes now, because the smack had not been gentle, but Shabine persisted. ‘Oh, please, Aga! Just a little taste – just a taste of your coffee, there?’ Leah had caught on, though fearful of getting a smack too: ‘Ooh, yes, Aga, can we just have a taste?’ He had growled, like a thunderhead, and said: ‘I’m the only food you’re to put in
your
mouth.’ Shabine, always bolder than Leah, snapped: ‘Swallowed that once and it made me want to
sick up
,’ she said, wriggling from between his huge hairy legs and darting away. ‘It tasted like death! Bitter like death. I want something
sweet
!’

‘Come back here!’ he bellowed. ‘You shitless creature.’

At this, carried away by Shabine’s small rebellion, Leah had dropped his pendulous belly and rushed over to her friend.

‘Shitless, the
pair
of you,’ the Aga had snapped, sitting forward in his lounger. But he switched immediately to wheedling. ‘And if I give you a sip of my coffee, will you come back here and finish what you
started
?’

‘Oo,’ squealed Shabine. ‘Coffee! Coffee!’

‘You come here now,’ the Big Man had said, settling back, ‘or I’ll shave your fucking heads right now, and throw you on the mercy of your aunts.’ But even this hadn’t deflated Shabine’s excitement. She and Leah had squirmed back over the fellow’s body, and taken turns at the lip of his little cup. Shabine first, Leah second. The liquid was lukewarm, gooey, and it made a weird contrary jarring confusion on her tongue. There was something sweet about it, she thought, much sweeter than the time Nada had brought some stems of wild beet back from the wasteland and Leah had licked at the broken end. But the predominant flavour had been horribly
bitter
– even more bitter than the Big Man’s gunk, which was horrible-tasting enough, and which even he never expected them to swallow (sometimes Shabine did, mind you, though it never had good consequences). It was so tart a flavour that it set Leah’s face into a rictus, and she gagged. Shabine endured the coffee a little better, but even she made a face like a rat, pushing out her lips and wrinkling her nostrils. The Big Man had found this very amusing. After that, he had pressed sips of coffee upon the girls on several occasions, and Leah came to associate the ghastly combination of sweetness and toxicity with those sessions.

‘I’d rather have an ice cream,’ she had told Rodion.

Pap mocked her, and they had one of their instant fallings-out. The black swan thrashed the waters languidly with its wings; not wanting to fly, apparently, but not wanting simply to sit still either. Rodion always looked pained when Leah bickered with one of her friends. ‘Perhaps a compromise?’ he suggested. ‘They do a very lovely coffee ice cream, I believe.’

‘I would prefer strawberry, Rodio,
if
you don’t mind,’ said Leah, scowling and crossing her arms. She was cross about Pap and the coffee, though Pap of course didn’t understand why she was. Pap wasn’t the one who had been kidnapped, after all. But by the time Rodion came back to them the two girls had made up.

Then it was Ezra’s seventh birthday, and he had a party, and Mama insisted that Leah join in. She pointed out that she was way older than any of Ez’s stupid friends, but Mama got cross with her and wouldn’t hear a word of excuse
about it
. Snappity snap snap. So there she was, sat scowling amongst all these
little little
boys. She watched a portion of some book or other on the lap of her smartdress, one of her own, and tried to pay them no mind, but her carer kept hissing that she was being rude. Like she cared! Not even Ez cared. A vampire pursued a woman over the folds of her dress hem – but a
good
vampire, who didn’t want to eat food, but instead made up blood-substitute from water and iron and stuff. Then the little boys all got in a ring and she had to join them. Even though she was way older, some of these boys were almost the same height as her! It was pretty humiliating. Back in the village she’d been one of the tallest – her mother had taken a pride in it, and kept feeding her milk as long as she could snatch scraps of food to keep the supply going. She had had the memory of milk, long before she had ever tasted a Central Park ice cream. She’d been
much
taller than Shabine, say. The Big Man had done
all
the uncomfortable things to Shabine, because – well, why wouldn’t he? But he’d been more restrained with Leah, telling her that, being so tall, there was a future financial margin in keeping her unmolested. And it had been her height that had singled her out (nobody had
told
her this; she’d worked it out for herself) and it had been her height that had meant that her mama and dad had driven up to the village in a car the size of a house. And the ride in the flitter, and the plane. But then she’d got to NY and discovered that she was the shortest girl in her age-year!

It was humiliating.

The memory of milk. The taste of stars.

Ez was like an alien monster, anyway; like the creature in
Hyperspace Horror
. He looked like a Homo sapiens, but he had no interest in normal human things. He didn’t like books, for instance. He only liked sports, and even then his attention only held for the start of the show. Then he’d get too excited and run off to imitate the players – to hurtle his ball against the walls, for instance; or to smack the cleaning bots with his Harding Stick.

Mama wasn’t angry with her
all
the time, of course. Sometimes she’d be really affectionate, and fold Leah in a great hug and cry tears into her hair. But
most
of the time she was snappish. ‘You Mama has a problem,’ was Pap’s opinion.

‘I know!’

‘I know you know!’

‘I know you know you know!’

‘Wrongo!’ Pap. ‘You should say
I know you know I know
!’

‘I said exactly what I intended to,’ said Leah, regally.

‘You know Kelley’s parents dee-eye-vee-ohed? And, and, Kelley’s dad had a catastrophic personality breakdown afterwards! Maybe that’s what’s happening to your Mama!’

‘Maybe,’ said Leah, though cautiously; because it seemed to her that Mama kept to a pretty even keel, most of the time. But what did she know?

And then it was announced that there was going to be a new

Angels and Pain
book, and with the same actors! There’d been talk of number seven being the last one, but now there was going to be an eighth! Everybody Leah knew was more excited than it was humanly possible to
bear
.

THREE

OF QUEENS’ GARDENS

1

The three years after she separated from her husband were the happiest of Marie’s life. This wasn’t cause and effect. This was not exactly cause and effect. It wasn’t that she had been miserable with her husband and
therefore
happy to separate from him. Rather, it
just so happened
that becoming single again coincided with new substance entering her existence. She had no wish to be unfair, or to blame George for everything. These things might have happened whilst she was still married to him. It was just that they hadn’t. Or, to be particular, the one thing that
had
happened – she got her daughter back – had turned out to be the catalyst for ending the marriage. And as she said to her friends, she had not realized how much she loved her daughter until Leah had been taken away. But everything else had come afterwards by serendipity. Her glancing association with the Queens Rewilding Project had blossomed (good word!) into something truly fulfilling. Her friendship with Arto had grown into something special, the authentic emotional and sexual connection she had always craved and never known. She had come to an understanding of her trauma, and that in turn had unlocked its
creative
potential. You didn’t realize that trauma could be creative? Plus, she had a new circle of friends. That awkward transition from the friends one has as a couple (those awful people they’d met on Ararat, for instance) to your
own
friends was miraculously shorted. She took up the standing invitation to join the Project Steering Committee – the cabal, they called themselves. And there she was, chatting by Lance with Imlah, or Lehmann, or ‘the Minotaur’, or meeting in person with Moniza Stainer, who represented the Five States administration, or handsome Arto – who claimed to be a
spy
, the big kidder – or with Fainlight. Fainlight was the sole member of the cabal who had to work for a living. Nobody called her a jobsucker to her face, of course; that would have been vulgar. But it’s what she was. Her business was to liaise between the cabal itself and the lower strata of labour collectives and frontages, to ward off the ‘news’ horrors that would otherwise contaminate the work of the Project. All the messy how-to things. Obviously, Marie didn’t socialize with her. But the rest of the cabal provided a very useful new set. People to drink with, to chat, to play.