Year of the Flood: Novel (12 page)

22

Saint Allan Sparrow of Clean Air: not a Day that had so far lived up to its name. Toby picked her way through the crowded pleebland streets, carrying her bag of dried herbals and bottled medicinals hidden under her loose coverall. The afternoon thunderstorm had cleared the fumes and particulate somewhat, but she was wearing a black nose cone anyway, in honour of Saint Sparrow. As was the custom.

She felt safer on the street since Blanco had been put into Painball; still, she never strolled or loitered, but — remembering Zeb’s instructions — also she didn’t run. It was best to look purposeful, as if you were on a mission. She ignored the passing stares, the anti-Gardener slurs, but she was alert to sudden movement or to anyone coming too close. A pleebrat gang had once grabbed her mushrooms; luckily for them, she hadn’t been carrying anything lethal that time.

She was heading towards the Cheese Factory building to fulfil Zeb’s request. This was the third time she’d gone. If Lucerne’s headaches were real and not just a bid for attention, an over-the-counter double-strength painkiller/soporific from HelthWyzer could have handled the problem, either by curing her or killing her. But Corps pills were taboo among the Gardeners, so she’d been using extract of Willow, followed by Valerian, with some Poppy mixed in; though not too much Poppy, as it could be addictive.

“What’s in this?” Lucerne would say each time Toby had treated her. “It tastes better when Pilar makes it.”

Toby would refrain from saying that Pilar had in fact made it, and would urge Lucerne to swallow the dose. Then she’d put a cold compress on her forehead and sit by her bedside, trying to tune out Lucerne’s whining.

The Gardeners were expected to avoid any broadcasting of their personal problems: foisting your mental junk on others was frowned on. For drinking Life there are two cups, Nuala taught the small children. What’s in each of them might be exactly the same, but my, oh my, the taste is so different!

The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy —
Now, which one would you rather have in
your
tummy?

This was a basic Gardener credo. But though Lucerne could mouth the slogans, she hadn’t internalized the teachings: Toby could tell a sham when she saw one, being a sham herself. As soon as Toby was locked into the ministering position, everything that was festering inside Lucerne would come roiling out. Toby would nod and say nothing, hoping to convey the impression of sympathy, though in reality she’d be considering how many drops of Poppy it would take to knock Lucerne unconscious before she, Toby, gave in to her worst impulses and throttled her.

As she quick-stepped through the streets, Toby anticipated Lucerne’s complaints. If true to pattern, they’d be about Zeb: why was he never there when Lucerne needed him? How had she ended up in this unsanitary septic tank with this clutch of dreamers —
I don’t mean you, Toby, you’ve got some sense
— who didn’t understand the first thing about how the world really worked? She was buried alive here with a monster of egotism, with a man who cared only about his own needs. Talking to him was like talking to a potato — no, to a stone. He didn’t hear you, he never told you what he was thinking, he was hard as flint.

Not that Lucerne hadn’t tried. She wanted to be a responsible person, she really did believe that Adam One was right about so many things, and nobody loved animals more than she did, but really there was a limit and she did not believe for one instant that slugs had any central nervous system, and to say they had souls was to make a mockery of the whole idea of souls, and she resented that, because nobody had more respect for souls than she did, she’d always been a very spiritual person. As for saving the world, nobody wanted to save the world as much as she did, but no matter how much the Gardeners deprived themselves of proper food and clothing and even proper showers, for heaven’s sake, and felt more high and mighty and virtuous than everyone else, it wouldn’t really change anything. They were just like those people who used to whip themselves during the Middle Ages — those flagrants.

“Flagellants,” Toby had said, the first time this came up.

Then Lucerne had said she didn’t mean it about the Gardeners, she was just feeling gloomy because of the headache. Also because they looked down on her for coming from a Corps, and for ditching her husband and running away with Zeb. They didn’t trust her. They thought she was a slut. They made dirty jokes about her behind her back. Or the children did — didn’t they?

“The children make dirty jokes about everyone,” Toby had said. “Including me.”

“You?” Lucerne had said, opening her large eyes with their dark lashes. “Why would they make dirty jokes about you?” Nothing sexual about
you,
was what she meant. Flat as a board, back and front. Worker bee.

There was a plus to that: at least Lucerne wasn’t jealous of her. In that respect, Toby stood alone among the Gardener women.

“They don’t look down on you,” Toby had said. “They don’t think you’re a slut. Now just relax and close your eyes and picture the Willow moving through your body, up to your head, where the pain is.”

It was true that the Gardeners didn’t look down on Lucerne, or not for the reasons she thought they did. They might resent the way she slacked off on chores and could never learn how to chop a carrot, they might be scornful of the messiness of her living space and her pathetic attempt at windowsill tomato-growing and the amount of time she spent in bed, but they didn’t care about her infidelity, or her adultery, or whatever it had once been called.

That was because the Gardeners didn’t bother with marriage certificates. They endorsed fidelity as long as a pair-bonding was current but there was no record of the first Adam and the first Eve going through a wedding, so in their eyes neither the clergymen of other religions nor any secular official had the power to marry people. As for the CorpSeCorps, they favoured official marriages only as a means for capturing your iris image, your fingerscans, and your DNA, all the better to track you with. Or so the Gardeners claimed, and this was one claim of theirs that Toby could believe without reservation.

Among the Gardeners, weddings were simple affairs. Both parties had to proclaim in front of witnesses that they loved each other. They exchanged green leaves to symbolize growth and fertility and jumped over a bonfire to symbolize the energy of the universe, then declared themselves married and went to bed. For divorces they did the whole thing in reverse: a public statement of non-love and separation, the exchange of dead twigs, and a swift hop over a heap of cold ashes.

A standing complaint of Lucerne’s — which was sure to come up if Toby wasn’t quick enough with the Poppy — was that Zeb had never invited her to do the green-leaf and bonfire-leaping ceremony with him. “Not that I think it means anything,” she’d say. “But he must think it does, because he’s one of them, right? So by not doing it, he’s refusing commitment. Don’t you agree?”

“I never know what anyone thinks,” Toby would say.

“But if it was you, wouldn’t you feel he was shirking his responsibility?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Toby would say. “Ask why he hasn’t …” Was
proposed
the right word?

“He’d just get angry.” Lucerne would sigh. “He was so different when I first knew him!”

Then Toby would be treated to the story of Lucerne and Zeb — a story Lucerne never tired of telling.

23

The story went like this. Lucerne met Zeb at the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park — did Toby know the AnooYoo? Oh. Well, it was a fantastic place to unwind and get yourself resurfaced. This was right after it was built and they were still putting in the landscaping. The fountains, the lawns, the gardens, the bushes. The lumiroses. Didn’t Toby just love lumiroses? She’d never seen them? Oh. Well, maybe sometime …

Lucerne loved to get up at dawn, she was an early riser then, she liked to watch the sunrise; it was because she’d always been so sensitive to colour and light, she’d paid so much attention to the aesthetic values in her homes — the homes she’d decorated. She loved to include at least one room in sunrise colours — the sunrise room, she would think of that room.

Also she was restless in those days. She was really very restless, because her husband was cold as a crypt, and they never made love any more because he was too busy with his career. And she was a sensual person, she always had been, and her sensual nature was being starved to death. Which was bad for the health, and especially for the immune system. She’d read the studies on that!

So there she was, prowling around at dawn in her pink kimono and crying a little, and contemplating a divorce from her HelthWyzer Corp husband, or a separation at least, though she realized it would not be the best thing for Ren, so young then and fond of her father, not that he paid enough attention to Ren either. And suddenly there was Zeb, in the rising light, like a — well, like a vision, all by himself, planting a lumirose bush. One of those roses that glow in the dark, the scent was so divine — had Toby ever smelled them? — she didn’t suppose so because the Gardeners were death on anything new, but those roses were really pretty.

So there was a man, in the dawn, kneeling on the ground and looking as if he was holding a bouquet of live coals.

What restless woman can resist a man with a shovel in one hand and a glowing rose bush in the other, and a moderately crazed glitter in his eyes that might be mistaken for love? thought Toby. On Zeb’s part there must have been something to be said for an attractive woman in a pink kimono, a loosely tied pink kimono, on a lawn in a pearly sunrise, especially when tearful. Because Lucerne was attractive. Simply from a visual point of view, she was very attractive. Even if whining, which was the way Toby saw her mostly.

Lucerne had wafted across the lawn, aware of her bare feet on the damp cool grass, aware of the brush of fabric across her thighs, aware of the tightness around her waist and the looseness below her collarbone. Billowing, like waves. She’d stopped in front of Zeb, who’d been watching her come towards him as if he’d been a sailor dumped into the ocean by mistake and she’d been either a mermaid or a shark. (Toby supplied these images: Lucerne said Fate.) They were both just so
aware,
she told Toby; she’d always been aware of other peoples’ awareness, she was like a cat, or, or … she had that talent, or was it a curse — that was how she knew. So she could feel from the inside what Zeb was feeling as he watched her. That was overwhelming!

It was impossible to explain this in words, she’d say, as if nothing of the sort could ever have happened to Toby herself.

Anyway, there they stood, though they’d already foreseen what was about to happen — what had to happen. Fear and lust pushed them together and held them apart, equally.

Lucerne did not call it lust. She called it longing.

At this point, Toby would have an image of the set of salt and pepper shakers that used to be on the kitchen table in her long-ago childhood home: a little china hen, a little china rooster. The hen had been the salt, the rooster had been the pepper. Salty Lucerne had stood there in front of peppery Zeb, smiling and looking up, and she’d asked him a simple question — how many rose bushes would there be or something, she couldn’t remember, so mesmerized was she by Zeb’s … (Here Toby would turn off her attention because she didn’t want to hear about the biceps, triceps, and other muscular attractions of Zeb. Was she herself immune to them? No. Was she therefore jealous of this part of the story? Yes. We must be mindful of our own animal-nature tendencies and biases at all times, said Adam One.)

And then, Lucerne would say, hooking Toby back into her story — and then a strange thing had happened: she’d recognized Zeb.

“I’ve seen you before,” she’d said. “Didn’t you used to be at HelthWyzer? But you weren’t working on the grounds then! You were — ”

“Mistaken identity,” said Zeb. And then he’d kissed her. That kiss had gone right into her like a knife, and she’d crumpled into his arms like — like a dead fish — no — like a petticoat — no — like damp tissue paper! And then he’d picked her up and laid her down on the lawn, right where anyone could have seen, which was an unbelievable turn-on, and then he’d undone her kimono and pulled the petals off the roses he was holding and scattered them all over her body, and then the two of them … It was like a high-speed collision, said Lucerne, and she’d thought, How can I survive this, I’m going to die right here and now! And she could tell he felt the same.

Later — quite a lot later, after they were living together — he’d told her she’d been right. Yes, he’d been at HelthWyzer, but for reasons he wouldn’t go into he’d had to leave in a hurry, and he trusted her not to mention that earlier time and place he’d once inhabited, not to anybody. Which she hadn’t mentioned. Or not very much. Except right now, to Toby.

Back then, though, during her Spa sojourn — thank god she hadn’t been having any skin procedure that would have made her scabby, she’d just been there for a tuneup — back then, they’d had several more appetizer-sized helpings of each other, locked into one of the showers in the Spa pool’s changeroom, and after that she was stuck to Zeb like a wet leaf. As he was to her, she added. They couldn’t get enough of each other.

And then, after her Spa sessions were over and she was back at her so-called home, she’d slip out of the Compound on one pretext or another — shopping errands, mostly, the things you could buy in the Compound were so predictable — and they’d met secretly in the pleeb-lands — it was so exciting at first! — such funny places, junky little love hotels and rent-a-rooms, you took them by the hour, so far away from the buttoned-down ambiance of the HelthWyzer Compound; and then, when he’d had to travel in a hurry — there was some trouble, she’d never understood why, but he needed to get away very fast — and, well, she couldn’t bear to be apart from him.

So she’d left her so-called husband, not that it didn’t serve him right for being so inert. And they’d moved around from one city to another, from one trailer park to another, and Zeb had bought a few black-market procedures, for his fingers and his DNA and so on; and then, when it was safe, they’d come back, right here, to the Gardeners. Because Zeb had told her he’d been a Gardener all along. Or so he’d said. Anyway, he seemed to know Adam One quite well. They’d been to school together. Or something like that.

So Zeb was forced into it, Toby thought. He was ex-Corps, on the run; maybe he’d been black-marketing some proprietary item, such as a nanotechnology or a gene splice. That could be fatal if you were caught. And Lucerne had put face and ex-name together, and he’d had to distract her with sex, then take her with him to ensure her loyalty. It was either that or kill her. He couldn’t leave her behind: she would have felt scorned, she’d have set the CorpSeCorps dogs on him. Still, what a risk he’d taken. The woman was like an amateur car bomb: you never knew when she’d blow up or who she’d take down with her when she did. Toby wondered whether Zeb had ever thought of stuffing a cork down her epiglottis and slotting her into a carbon garboil dumpster.

But maybe he loved her. In his way. Hard though that was for Toby to picture. However, perhaps the love had run out, because he wasn’t doing enough maintenance work on her at the moment.

“Hasn’t your husband looked for you?” Toby had asked the first time she’d heard this tale. “The one at HelthWyzer?”

“I don’t consider that man to be my husband any more,” Lucerne said in an offended tone.

“Excuse me. Your former husband. Haven’t the CorpSeCorps … did you leave him a message?” The trail of Lucerne, if followed, would lead right to the Gardeners — not only to Zeb, but to Toby herself, and to her own former identity. Which could be uncomfortable for her: the CorpSeCorps never wrote off skipped debts, and what if anyone had dug up her father?

“Why would they spend the money?” said Lucerne. “I’m not important to them. As for my former husband” — she gave a little grimace — ”he ought to have married an equation. Maybe he doesn’t even notice I’ve gone.”

“What about Ren?” said Toby. “She’s a lovely little girl. Surely he misses her.”

“Oh,” said Lucerne. “Yes. He probably does notice that.”

Toby wanted to ask why Lucerne hadn’t simply left Ren behind with her father. Stealing her away, leaving no information — it seemed like a petty act of spite. But asking such a question would simply make Lucerne angry — it would sound too much like criticism.

Two blocks away from the Cheese Factory, Toby ran into a pleebrat street fight — Asian Fusions versus Blackened Redfish, with a few Lintheads shouting around the edges. These kids were only seven or eight, but there were a lot of them, and when they spotted her they stopped yelling at one another and started yelling at her.
Goddie goddie, whitey bitch! Get her shoes!

She swivelled so her back was against a wall and prepared to fend them off. It was difficult to kick them really hard when they were that young — as Zeb had pointed out in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation class, there was a species inhibition against hurting children — but she knew she’d have to, because they could be deadly. They’d aim for her stomach, ram her with their hard little heads, try to pull her down. The smaller ones had a nasty habit of hoisting the Gardener women’s baggy skirts and diving in under them, then biting whatever they could find once they were in there. But she was ready for them: when they got close enough, she’d twist their ears or chop their necks with the side of her hand, or bang two of their little skulls together.

Suddenly, however, they swerved like a school of fish, rushed past her, and disappeared into an alleyway.

She turned her head, saw why. It was Blanco. He wasn’t in Painball at all. He must have been let out. Or got out, somehow.

Panic gripped her heart. She saw his red-and-blue flayed hands, she felt her bones crumbling. This was her worst fear.

Take hold,
she told herself. He was across the street, and she was inside her baggy coverall and had her nose cone on, so maybe he couldn’t recognize her. And he’d given no sign yet that he’d noticed her. But she was alone, and he wasn’t above a random stomp-and-rape. He’d drag her up that very same alleyway, the one where the pleebrats had gone. Then he’d rip off the cone and see who she was. And that would be the end, but it wouldn’t be a quick end. It would be as slow as he could make it. He’d turn her into a flesh billboard — a not-quite-living demonstration of his rank finesse.

She turned quickly and marched away as fast as she could, before he’d had a chance to focus his malevolence on her. Breathless, she turned the corner, went half a block, glanced back. He wasn’t there.

For once she was more than happy to reach the door of Lucerne’s apartment. She raised her nose cone, twitched the muscles of her professional smile, and knocked.

“Zeb?” Lucerne called. “Is that you?”