Year of the Flood: Novel (33 page)

THE WATER-SHREW THAT RENDS ITS PREY

The Water-Shrew that rends its Prey
Acts purely out of Nature’s need;
It does not stop to plot its course,
But simply does the deed.

The Leopard pouncing in the night
Is kin to soft domestic Puss —
They love to hunt, and hunt to love,
Because God made them thus.

And who can say if joy or fear
Are each in other’s lasting debt?
Does every Prey enjoy each breath
Because of constant threat?

But we are not as Animals —
We cherish other Creatures’ lives;
And so we do not eat their flesh
Unless dread Famine drives.

And if dread Famine drives us on,
And if we yield to tempting Meat,
May God forgive our broken Vows,
And bless the Life we eat.

From
The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

62

TOBY. SAINT NGANEKO MINHINNICK OF MANUKAU

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

A red sunrise, meaning rain later. But there’s always rain later.

Mist rising.

Oodle-oodle-ooo. Oodle-oodle-oo. Chirrup, twareep. Aw aw aw. Ey ey ey. Hoom hoom baroom.

Mourning dove, robin, crow, bluejay, bullfrog. Toby says their names, but these names mean nothing to them. Soon her own language will be gone out of her head and this will be all that’s left in there. Ooodle-oodle-oo, hoom hoom. The ceaseless repetition, the song with no beginning and no end. No questions, no answers, not in so many words. Not in any words at all. Or is it all one huge Word?

Where has this notion come from, out of nowhere and into her head?

Tobeee!

So much like someone calling her. But it’s only birdsong.

She’s up on the roof, cooking her daily portion of land shrimp in the cool of the morning. Don’t scorn the lowly table of Saint Euell, says the voice of Adam One. The Lord provides, and sometimes what He provides is land shrimp, says Zeb. Rich in lipids, a good source of protein. How do you think bears get so fat?

Best to cook outside, because of the smoke and heat. She’s using her Saint Euell — inspired hobo stove, made of a bulk-sized body-butter can: hole in the bottom for dry sticks and the draft, hole on the side for smoke. The maximum heat for the minimum fuel. No more than needed. The land shrimp sizzle on the top.

Suddenly there’s a racket of crows: they’re excited about something. Not alarm calls, so not an owl. More like astonishment:
Aw Aw! Look! Look! Look at that!

Toby scrapes the crispy land shrimp off the top of her tin can onto her plate — to waste food is to waste Life, says Adam One — then douses the fire with her pot of rainwater and hits the rooftop, flat on her belly. Lifts the binoculars. The crows are flying around above the treetops, a flock of them. Six or seven.
Aw! Aw! Look! Look! Look!

Two men come out from among the trees. They aren’t singing, and they aren’t naked and blue: they have clothes on.

There are still people, Toby thinks. Alive. Maybe one of them is Zeb, come in search of her: he must have guessed she’d still be here, still be holed up, still holding out. She blinks: are these tears? She wants to rush downstairs and out into the open, hold out her arms in welcome, laugh with happiness. But caution restrains her, and she crouches down behind the air-conditioning exhaust unit and peers through the rooftop railings.

It could be a trick of the senses. Is she seeing things again?

The men are in camouflage gear. The one in front has a weapon of some kind — a spraygun, perhaps. Surely not Zeb: wrong shape. Neither of them is. There’s another person with them — man or woman? Tall, in a khaki outfit. Head hanging down; hard to tell which. Hands held together in front, as if in prayer. One of the men has this person by the arm or elbow. Pushing or pulling.

Then another man emerges from the shadows. He’s leading a huge bird on a leash — no, on a rope — a bird with blue-green iridescent plumes like a peagret. But this bird has the head of a woman.

I must be hallucinating again, thinks Toby. Because no matter what the gene splicers could do, they couldn’t do this. The men and the bird-woman look real and solid enough, but then, hallucinations do.

One of them has a burden slung over his shoulder. At first she thinks it’s a sack, but no, it’s a haunch of something. It has fur. Golden fur. Is it a liobam? A shiver of horror runs through her: sacrilege! They’ve killed an Animal on the Peaceable Kingdom list!

Think clearly, Toby orders herself. First of all, since when are you a fanatical Peaceable Kingdom Isaiahist? Second, if these men are real and not just runoff from an addled brain, they’ve been killing things. Killing and butchering large Creatures, in which case they have lethal weapons and they’ve started at the top of the food chain. They’re a menace, they’ll stop at nothing, and I ought to shoot them before they get as far as me. Then I can free the large bird or whatever it is, before they kill it as well.

Anyway, if they aren’t real, it won’t matter if I shoot them. They’ll just dissolve like smoke.

Then the one leading the bird-woman looks up. He must have seen Toby, because he begins to shout, waving his free arm. Light glints from a knife. The other two men look, and then they all start trotting towards the Spa. The bird creature has to keep up with them because of the rope, and now Toby can see that the feathers are a costume of some kind. It’s a woman. No wings. A noose around her neck.

Not a hallucination, then. Real. Real evil.

She centres the knife man in her scope and shoots at him. He staggers backwards and yells and stumbles. But she isn’t fast enough, so although she squeezes off a couple more, she misses the other two.

Now the wounded man’s up again, limping, and all of them are running back to the trees. The bird woman’s running with them. Not that she has a choice, because of the rope. Then she falls down and vanishes into the weeds.

Behind the others, the green tree-leaves open, swallow. Gone now. All of them. She can’t spot the place where the woman tumbled: the weeds are too tall. Should she go out and look for her? No. It could be a decoy. There’d be three against her one.

She watches for a long time. The crows must be following them — the men, the one in khaki.
Aw aw aw aw.
A trail of sound, off into the distance.

Will they be back? They’ll be back, thinks Toby. They know I’m in here, they’ll guess I must have food in order to have stayed alive this long. Also I shot one of them: they’ll want revenge, it’s only human. They’ll be vindictive, like the pigs. But they won’t come soon, because they know I have a rifle. They’ll have to plan.

63

TOBY. SAINT WEN BO DAY

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

No men. No pigs either. No liobams.

No bird woman.

Maybe I lost my mind, thinks Toby. Not lost. Temporarily misplaced.

It’s bath time; she’s up on the roof. She pours rainwater from her collection of smaller bowls and pans into the largest bowl, soaps herself, hands and face only: she won’t risk the vulnerability of a full bath, because who knows who may be peering? She’s in the midst of sponging off the suds when she hears the crows making a commotion, close by.
Aw aw aw!
This time it sounds like laughing.

Toby! Toby! Help me!

Was that my name? thinks Toby. She looks over the railing, sees nothing. But the voice comes again, right close to the building.

Is it a trap? A woman calling out to her, a man’s arm around her throat, a knife to the jugular?

Toby! It’s me! Please!

She blots herself with a towel, slides into her top-to-toe, shoulders the rifle, makes her way down the stairs. Opens the door: no one. But the voice again, so near.
Oh please!

Left corner: nobody. Right corner, nobody again. She’s just outside the garden gate when a woman comes around the building. She’s hobbling, she’s thin and beat up; her long hair’s across her face, matted with dirt and dried blood. She’s wearing a spangled body suit, with damp, tattered blue feathers.

The bird woman. Some freak from a sex circus. She’s bound to be infected, a walking plague. If she touches me, thinks Toby, I’m dead.

“Keep away from me!” she shouts. She backs up against the garden fence. “Fuck off out of here!”

The woman sways on her feet. She has a gash on her leg, and her bare arms are scratched and bleeding — she must have run through brambles. All Toby can think of is the fresh blood: boiling with microbes and viruses.

“Piss off! Get away!!”

“I’m not sick,” says the woman. Tears are running down her face. But they’d all said that in their despair. They’d said it, pleading, holding up their hands for help, for comfort, and then they’d turned into pink porridge. Toby had watched them from the roof.

They’ll be drowning. Don’t let them clutch you. Don’t let yourself be that last straw, my Friends, says Adam One.

The rifle. She fumbles with the strap: it’s caught in the fabric of her top-to-toe. How to fend off this festering hotspot? Yelling’s no good without a weapon. Maybe I could bang her on the head with a stone, thinks Toby. But she doesn’t have a stone. A good kick in the solar plexus, then wash my feet.

You are an uncharitable person, says the voice of Nuala. You have scorned God’s Creatures, for are not Human beings God’s Creatures too?

From under the mat of hair the woman pleads: “Toby! It’s me!” She crumples, falls to her knees. Then Toby sees it’s Ren. Beneath all the dirt and mangled glitz, it’s only little Ren.

64

Toby hauls Ren inside the Spa building and dumps her on the floor while she locks the door behind them. Ren is still crying hysterically, in great gulping sobs.

“Never you mind,” says Toby. She takes Ren under the arms and pulls her upright, and they stumble down the hall into one of the treatment cubicles. Ren’s a dead weight, but she’s not very heavy, and Toby manages to hoist her onto a massage table. She smells of sweat and earth, and blood somewhere, and another smell: something’s decaying.

“Stay here,” says Toby unnecessarily: Ren isn’t going anywhere. She’s lying back on the pink pillow with her eyes closed. One of those eyes is black and blue. AnooYoo Soothing Aloe Eye Pads, thinks Toby. With Extra Arnica. She breaks open a packet and applies them, and adds a pink sheet, tucked in at the sides so Ren won’t fall off the table. There’s a cut on Ren’s forehead, another on her cheek: nothing too serious, she’ll deal with those later.

She goes into the kitchen, boils up some water in the Kelly kettle. Most likely Ren’s dehydrated. She pours hot water into a cup, adds a little of her cherished honey, a pinch of salt. Some dried green onions from her dwindling stash. Carries the cup into Ren’s cubicle, takes off the eye pads, sits her up.

Ren’s eyes are huge in her thin, bruised face. “I’m not sick,” she says, which is untrue: she’s burning with fever. But there’s more than one kind of sickness. Toby checks the symptoms: no blood oozing from the pores, no froth. Still, Ren could be a plague carrier, an incubator; in which case, Toby’s already infected.

“Try to drink,” says Toby.

“I can’t,” says Ren. But she does manage to get some of the water down. “Where’s Amanda? I need to get dressed.”

“It’s okay,” says Toby. “Amanda’s nearby. Now try to sleep.” She eases Ren back down. So Amanda’s in this story somewhere, she thinks. That girl was always trouble.

“I can’t see,” says Ren. She’s trembling all over.

Back in the kitchen, Toby pours the rest of the boiled water into a bowl: she needs to clean away those bedraggled feathers and sequins. She carries the bowl and a pair of scissors and a bar of soap and a stack of pink washcloths into Ren’s cubicle, folds back the sheet, and cuts away the grubby outfit. It isn’t cloth, it’s some other substance, underneath the feathers. Stretchy. Almost like skin. She soaks the patches where it’s stuck on so she can peel them off more easily. The crotch has been torn away. Cripes, thinks Toby, what a mess. Later she’ll make a poultice.

There are abrasions around the neck — rope burns, no doubt. The gash on the left leg is what’s festering. Toby’s as gentle as she can be, but Ren winces and yelps. “That fucking hurts!” she says. Then she throws up the salt-and-sugar water.

After she’s wiped away the filth, Toby starts washing the leg wound. “How did you get this?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” Ren is whispering. “I fell down.”

Toby cleans out the gash and puts some honey on it. Antibiotics in it, Pilar used to say. There ought to be a first-aid kit, somewhere in the Spa. “Hold still. You don’t want gangrene,” she says to Ren.

Ren giggles. “Knock, knock,” she says, “Gang grene.”

The dirty covering’s all stripped away, and Ren has been sponged. “I’ll give you some Willow and Chamomile,” Toby says. And Poppy, she thinks. “You need to sleep.” Ren will be safer on the floor than on the table: she makes a nest of pink towels, eases her down onto it, adds extra padding because Ren can’t make it to the bathroom, she’s too weak. She’s hot as an ember.

Toby brings the Willow mixture in a small glass. Ren swallows, her throat moving like a bird’s. Nothing comes up.

There’s no use trying the maggots yet. Ren needs to be coherent for that, able to obey instructions: no scratching, for instance. The first thing is to get the temperature down.

While Ren sleeps, Toby sorts through her store of dried mushrooms. She chooses the immune-system boosters: reishi, maitake, shitake, birch polypore, zhu ling, lion’s mane, coryceps, ice man. She puts them in boiled water to soak. Then in the afternoon she prepares a mushroom elixir — the simmering, the straining, the cooling — and gives Ren thirty drops of it.

The cubicle stinks. Toby lifts Ren up, rolls her to the side, pulls out the soiled towels, wipes Ren off. She’s put on rubber gloves for the purpose: if dysentery’s going around she has no wish to catch it. She smoothes down clean towels, rolls Ren back. Her arms flop, her head wilts; she’s muttering.

This is going to be a lot of work, thinks Toby. And when Ren recovers — if she recovers — there will be two people eating instead of one. So the food stash will be gone twice as quickly. What’s left of it. Which isn’t much.

Maybe the fever will get the better of Ren. Maybe she’ll die in her sleep.

Toby considers the powdered Death Angels. It wouldn’t take much. Just a little, in Ren’s weakened condition. Put her out of her misery. Help her to fly away on white, white wings. Maybe it would be kinder. A blessing.

I am an unworthy person, Toby thinks. Merely to have such an idea. You’ve known this girl since she was a child, she’s come to you for help, she has every right to trust you. Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. Toby can’t quite see it that way, not at the moment. But she’ll have to keep trying.

Ren sighs and groans and flails. She’s having a bad dream.

When it’s dark, Toby lights a candle and sits beside her, listening to her breathe. In out, in out. Pause. In. Then out. Raggedy. At intervals she feels Ren’s forehead. Cooler? There must be a thermometer in the building; in the morning she’ll look for it. She takes her pulse: rapid, irregular.

Then she nods off in her chair, and the next thing she knows she wakes up in the dark with a smell of singeing. She winds up her flashlight: the candle has fallen over, and a corner of Ren’s pink sheet is smouldering. Luckily it’s damp.

That was terminally stupid, Toby tells herself. No more candles unless I’m fully awake.