Year of the Flood: Novel (7 page)

13

I lived with Lucerne and Zeb in a building about five blocks from the Garden. It was called the Cheese Factory because that’s what it used to be, and it still had a faint cheesy smell to it. After the cheese it was used for artists’ lofts, but there weren’t any artists left, and nobody seemed to know who owned it. Meanwhile the Gardeners had taken it over. They liked living in places where they didn’t have to pay rent.

Our space was a big room, with some cubicles curtained off — one for me, one for Lucerne and Zeb, one for the violet biolet, one for the shower. The cubicle curtains were woven of plastic-bag strips and duct tape, and they weren’t in any way soundproof. This wasn’t great, especially when it came to the violet biolet. The Gardeners said digestion was holy and there was nothing funny or terrible about the smells and noises that were part of the end product of the nutritional process, but at our place those end products were hard to ignore.

We ate our meals in the main room, on a table made out of a door. All of our dishes and pots and pans were salvaged — gleaned, as the Gardeners said — except for some of the thicker plates and mugs. Those had been made by the Gardeners back in their Ceramics period, before they’d decided that kilns used up too much energy.

I slept on a futon stuffed with husks and straw. It had a quilt sewed out of blue jeans and used bathmats, and every morning I had to make the bed first thing, because the Gardeners liked neatly made beds, though they weren’t squeamish about what they were made of. Then I’d take my clothes down from the nail on the wall and put them on. I got clean ones every seventh day: the Gardeners didn’t believe in wasting water and soap on too much washing. My clothes were always dank, because of the humidity and because the Gardeners didn’t believe in dryers. “God made the sun for a reason,” Nuala used to say, and according to her that reason was for drying our clothes.

Lucerne would still be in bed, it being her favourite place. Back when we’d lived at HelthWyzer with my real father she’d hardly ever stayed inside our house, but here she almost never went out of it, except to go over to the Rooftop or the Wellness Clinic and help the other Gardener women peel burdock roots or make those lumpy quilts or weave those plastic-bag curtains or something.

Zeb would be in the shower:
No daily showers
was one of the many Gardener rules Zeb ignored. Our shower water came down a garden hose out of a rain barrel and was gravity-fed, so no energy was used. That was Zeb’s reason for making an exception for himself. He’d be singing:

Nobody gives a hoot,
Nobody gives a hoot,
And that is why we’re down the chute,
Cause nobody gives a hoot!

All his shower songs were negative in this way, though he sang them cheerfully, in his big Russian-bear voice.

I had mixed feelings about Zeb. He could be frightening, but also it was reassuring to have someone so important in my family. Zeb was an Adam — a leading Adam. You could tell by the way the others looked up to him. He was large and solid, with a biker’s beard and long hair — brown with a little grey in it — and a leathery face, and eyebrows like a barbed-wire fence. He looked as if he ought to have a silver tooth and a tattoo, but he didn’t. He was strong as a bouncer, and he had the same menacing but genial expression, as if he’d break your neck if necessary, but not for fun.

Sometimes he’d play dominoes with me. The Gardeners were skimpy on toys —
Nature is our playground
— and the only toys they approved of were sewed out of leftover fabric or knitted with saved-up string, or they’d be wrinkly old-person figures with heads fashioned from dried crabapples. But they allowed dominoes, because they carved the sets themselves. When I won, Zeb would laugh and say, “Atta girl,” and then I’d get a warm feeling, like nasturtiums.

Lucerne was always telling me to be nice to him, because although he wasn’t my real father he was
like
my real father, and it hurt his feelings if I was rude to him. But then she didn’t like it much when Zeb was nice to me. So it was hard to know how to act.

While Zeb was singing in the shower I’d get myself something to eat — dry soybits or maybe a vegetable patty left over from dinner. Lucerne was a fairly terrible cook. Then I’d go off to school. I was usually still hungry, but I could count on a school lunch. It wouldn’t be great, but it would be food. As Adam One used to say, Hunger is the best sauce.

I couldn’t remember ever being hungry at the HelthWyzer Compound. I really wanted to go back there. I wanted my real father, who must still love me: if he’d known where I was, he’d surely have come to take me back. I wanted my real house, with my own room and the bed with pink bed curtains and the closet full of different clothes in it. But most of all I wanted my mother to be the way she used to be, when she’d take me shopping, or go to the Club to play golf, or off to the AnooYoo Spa to get improvements done to herself, and then she’d come back smelling nice. But if I mentioned anything about our old life, she’d say all that was in the past.

She had a lot of reasons for running off with Zeb to join the Gardeners. She’d say their way was best for humankind, and for all the other creatures on Earth as well, and she’d acted out of love, not only for Zeb but for me, because she wanted the world to be healed so life wouldn’t die out completely, and didn’t it make me happy to know that?

She herself didn’t seem all that happy. She’d sit at the table brushing her hair, staring at herself in our one small mirror with an expression that was glum, or critical, or maybe tragic. She had long hair like all the Gardener women, and the brushing and the braiding and the pinning up was a big job. On bad days she’d go through the whole thing four or five times.

On the days when Zeb was away, she’d barely talk to me. Or she’d act as if I’d hidden him. “When did you last see him?” she’d say. “Was he at school?” It was like she wanted me to spy on him. Then she’d be apologetic and say, “How are you feeling?” as if she’d done something wrong to me.

When I’d answer, she wouldn’t be listening. Instead she’d be listening for Zeb. She’d get more and more anxious, even angry; she’d pace around and look out our window, talking to herself about how badly he treated her; but when he’d finally turn up, she’d fall all over him. Then she’d start nagging — where had he been, who had he been with, why hadn’t he come back sooner? He’d just shrug and say, “It’s okay, babe, I’m here now. You worry too much.”

Then the two of them would disappear behind their plastic-strip and duct-tape curtain, and my mother would make pained and abject noises I found mortifying. I hated her then, because she had no pride and no restraint. It was like she was running down the middle of the mallway with no clothes on. Why did she worship Zeb so much?

Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

The other thing I disliked so much at the Gardeners was the clothes. The Gardeners themselves were all colours, but their clothes weren’t. If Nature was beautiful, as the Adams and the Eves claimed — if the lilies of the field were our models — why couldn’t we look more like butterflies and less like parking lots? We were so flat, so plain, so scrubbed, so dark.

The street kids — the pleebrats — were hardly rich, but they were glittery. I envied the shiny things, the shimmering things, like the TV camera phones, pink and purple and silver, that flashed in and out of their hands like magician’s cards, or the Sea/H/Ear Candies they stuck into their ears to hear music. I wanted their gaudy freedom.

We were forbidden to make friends with the pleebrats, and on their part they treated us like pariahs, holding their noses and yelling, or throwing things at us. The Adams and the Eves said we were being persecuted for our faith, but it was most likely for our wardrobes: the pleebrats were very fashion-conscious and wore the best clothes they could trade or steal. So we couldn’t mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got their knowledge that way — we caught it like germs. We gazed at that forbidden worldly life as if through a chain-link fence.

Once I found a beautiful camera phone, lying on the sidewalk. It was muddy and the signal was dead, but I took it home anyway, and the Eves caught me with it. “Don’t you know any better?” they said. “Such a thing can hurt you! It can burn your brain! Don’t even look at it: if you can see it, it can see you.”

14

I first met Amanda in Year Ten, when I was ten: I was always the same age as the Year, so it’s easy to remember when it was.

That day was Saint Farley of Wolves — a Young Bioneer scavenging day, when we had to tie sucky green bandanas around our necks and go out gleaning for the Gardeners’ recycled-materials crafts. Sometimes we collected soap ends, carrying wicker baskets and making the rounds of the good hotels and restaurants because they threw out soap by the shovelful. The best hotels were in the rich pleebs — Fernside, Golfgreens, and the richest of all, SolarSpace — and we’d hitch rides to them, even though it was forbidden. The Gardeners were like that: they’d tell you to do something and then prohibit the easiest way to do it.

Rose-scented soap was the best. Bernice and me would take some home, and I’d keep mine in my pillowcase, to drown out the mildew smell of my damp quilt. We’d take the rest to the Gardeners, to be simmered into a jelly in the black-box solarcookers on the Rooftop, then cooled and cut up into slabs. The Gardeners used a lot of soap, because they were so worried about microbes, but some of the cut-up soaps would be set aside. They’d be rolled up in leaves and have strands of twisted grass tied around them, to be sold to tourists and gawkers at the Gardeners’ Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange, along with the bags of worms and the organic turnips and zucchinis and the other vegetables the Gardeners hadn’t used up themselves.

That day wasn’t a soap day, it was a vinegar day. We’d go to the back entrances of the bars and nightclubs and strip joints and pick through their dump boxes, and find any leftover wine, and pour it into our Young Bioneer enamel pails. Then we’d lug it off to the Wellness Clinic building, where it would be poured into the huge barrels in the Vinegar Room and fermented into vinegar, which the Gardeners used for household cleaning. The extra was decanted into the small bottles we’d gather up during our gleaning, which would have Gardeners labels glued onto them. Then they’d be offered for sale at the Tree of Life, along with the soap.

Our Young Bioneer work was supposed to teach us some useful lessons. For instance: Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use. And, most importantly, everyone, including children, had to contribute to the life of the community.

Shackie and Croze and the older boys sometimes drank their wine instead of saving it. If they drank too much, they’d fall down or throw up, or they’d get into fights with the pleebrats and throw stones at the winos. In revenge, the winos would pee into empty wine bottles to see if they could trick us. I never drank any piss myself: all you had to do was smell the opening of the bottle. But some kids had deadened their noses by smoking the butt ends of cigarettes or cigars, or even skunkweed if they could get it, and they’d upend the bottle, then spit and swear. Though maybe those kids drank from the peed-in bottles on purpose, to give themselves an excuse for the swearing, which was forbidden by the Gardeners.

As soon as they were out of sight of the Garden, Shackie and Croze and those boys would take off their Young Bioneer bandanas and tie them around their heads, like the Asian Fusions. They wanted to be a street gang too — they even had a password. “Gang!” they’d say, and the other person was supposed to say, “Grene.” So, gangrene. The “gang” part was because they were a gang, and the “grene” stood for “green,” like their head scarves. It was supposed to be a secret thing just for their gang members, but we all knew about it anyway. Bernice said it was a really good password for them, because gangrene was flesh rot and they were totally rotten.

“Big joke, Bernice,” said Crozier. “P.S., you’re ugly.”

We were supposed to glean in groups, so we could defend ourselves against the pleebrat street gangs, or the winos who might grab our pails and drink the wine, or the child-snatchers who might sell us on the chicken-sex market. But instead we’d break up in twos or threes because that way we could cover the territory faster.

On this particular day I started out with Bernice, but then we had a fight. We squabbled constantly, which I took as a sign of our friendship because no matter how viciously we fought we’d always make up afterwards. Some bond held us together: not hard like bone, but slippery, like cartilage. Most likely we both felt insecure among the Gardener kids; we were each afraid to be left without an ally.

This time our fight was over a beaded change purse with a starfish on it that we’d picked out of a trash pile. We coveted finds like that and were always looking for them. The pleeblanders threw a lot of stuff away, because — said the Adams and Eves — they had short attention spans and no morals.

“I saw it first,” I said.

“You saw it first last time,” said Bernice.

“So what? I still saw it first!”

“Your mother’s a skank,” said Bernice. That was unfair because I thought so myself and Bernice knew it.

“Yours is a vegetable!” I said. “Vegetable” shouldn’t have been an insult among the Gardeners, but it was. “Veena the Vegetable!” I added.

“Meat-breath!” said Bernice. She had the purse, and she was keeping it.

“Fine!” I said. I turned and walked away. I loitered, but I didn’t look around, and Bernice didn’t hurry after me.

This happened at the mallway, which was called Apple Corners. This was the official name of our pleeb, though everyone called it the Sinkhole because people vanished into it without a trace. We Gardener kids walked through the mallway whenever we could, just looking.

Like everything else in our pleeb, this mallway had once been classier. There was a broken fountain full of empty beer cans, there were built-in planters with a lot of Zizzy Froot cans and cigarette butts and used condoms covered (said Nuala) in festering germs. There was a holospinner booth that must once have spun out suns and moons, and rare animals, and your own image if you put money in, but it had been trashed some time ago and now stood empty-eyed. Sometimes we went inside it and pulled the tattered star-sprinkled curtain across, and read the messages left on the walls by the pleebrats.
Monica sucks. So does Darf only betr. UR $? 4 U free, baBc8s! Brad UR ded.
Those pleebrats were so daring, they’d write anywhere or anything. They didn’t care who saw it.

The Sinkhole pleebrats went into the holospinner to smoke dope — the booth reeked of it — and they had sex in there: we could tell because of the condoms and sometimes the panties they’d leave behind. Gardener kids weren’t supposed to do either one of those things — hallucinogenics were for religious purposes, and sex was for those who’d exchanged green leaves and jumped the bonfire — but the older Gardener kids said they’d done them anyway.

The shops that weren’t boarded up were twenty-dollar stores called Tinsel’s and Wild Side and Bong’s — names like that. They sold feather hats, and crayons for drawing on your body, and T-shirts with dragons and skulls and mean slogans. Also Joltbars, and chewing gum that made your tongue glow in the dark, and red-lipped ashtrays that said, Let Me Blow It For You, and In-Your-Skin Etcha-Tattoos the Eves said would burn your skin down to the veins. You could find expensive stuff at bargain prices that Shackie said were boosted from the SolarSpace boutiques.

Tawdry rubbish, all of it, the Eves would say. If you’re going to sell your soul, at least demand a higher price! Bernice and I paid no attention to that. Our souls didn’t interest us. We’d peer in the windows, giddy with wanting.
What would you get?
we’d say.
The LED-light wand? That’s baby! The Blood and Roses video? Gross, that’s for boys! The Real Woman Stick-on Bimplants, with responsive nipples? Ren, you suck!

After Bernice had left that day, I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought maybe I should just go back, because I didn’t feel too safe, alone. Then I saw Amanda, standing on the other side of the mallway with a group of Tex-Mexican pleeb girls. I knew that group by sight, and Amanda had never been with them before.

Those girls were wearing the sort of clothes they usually wore: miniskirts and spangled tops, candyfloss boas around their necks, silver gloves, plasticized butterflies clipped into their hair. They had their Sea/H/Ear Candies and their burning-bright phones and their jellyfish bracelets, and they were showing off. They were playing the same tune on their Sea/H/Ear Candies and they were dancing to it, swivelling their bums, sticking out their chests. They looked as if they already owned everything from every single store and were bored with it. I envied that look so much. I just stood there, envying.

Amanda was dancing too, except she was better. After a while she stopped and stood a little apart, texting on her purple phone. Then she stared straight at me and smiled, and waved her silver fingers. That meant
Come here.

I checked that no one was looking. Then I crossed the mallway.