Year of the Flood: Novel (8 page)

15

“You want to see my jellyfish bracelet?” Amanda said once I got there. I must have seemed pathetic to her, with my orphanish clothes and chalky fingers. She held up her wrist: there were the tiny jellyfish, opening and closing themselves like swimming flowers. They looked so perfect.

“Where did you get it?” I asked. I hardly knew what to say.

“Lifted,” said Amanda. That was how the pleebrat girls mostly got things.

“How do they stay alive in there?”

She pointed to the silver knob where the bracelet fastened. “This is an aerator,” she said. “It pumps in oxygen. You add the food twice a week.”

“What happens if you forget?”

“They eat each other,” said Amanda. She gave a little smile. “Some kids do that on purpose, they don’t add the food. Then it’s like a miniwar in there, and after a while there’s just one jellyfish left, and then it dies.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

Amanda kept the same smile. “Yeah. That’s why they do it.”

“They’re really pretty,” I said in a neutral voice. I wanted to please her, and I couldn’t tell whether she thought
horrible
was good or bad.

“Take it,” said Amanda. She held out her wrist. “I can lift another one.”

I wanted that bracelet so badly, but I wouldn’t know how to buy the food and the jellyfish would die. Or else the bracelet would be discovered, no matter how well I hid it, and I’d be in trouble. “I can’t,” I said. I took a step back.

“You’re one of
them,
aren’t you?” said Amanda. She wasn’t taunting, she seemed merely curious. “The Goddies. The Godawfuls. They say there’s a bunch of them around here.”

“No,” I said, “I’m not.” The lie must have stood out all over me. There were a lot of shabby people in the Sinkhole pleeb, but they weren’t shabby on purpose the way the Gardeners were.

Amanda tilted her head a little to one side. “Funny,” she said. “You look like them.”

“I only live with them,” I said. “I’m just more or less visiting them. I’m not really like them at all.”

“Of course you aren’t,” said Amanda, smiling. She gave my arm a little pat. “Come over here. I want to show you something.”

Where she took me was the alleyway that led to the back of Scales and Tails. We Gardener kids weren’t supposed to go there, but we did anyway because when we were collecting you could get a lot of vinegar wine if you were early enough to beat out the winos.

That alleyway was dangerous. Scales and Tails was a dirt den, said the Eves. We should never, ever go into it, especially not girls. It said,
ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
in neon over the door, which was guarded at night by two enormous men in black suits who wore sunglasses even though it was dark. One of the older Gardener girls claimed these men had said to her, “Come back in a year and bring your sweet little ass.” But Bernice said she was just bragging.

Scales had pictures on either side of the entrance — light-up holo-photos. The pictures were of beautiful girls covered completely with shining green scales, like lizards, except for the hair. One of them was standing on a single leg with the other leg hooked around her neck. I thought that it must hurt to stand like that, but the girl in the picture was smiling.

Did the scales grow or were they were pasted on? Bernice and I disagreed about that. I said they were pasted, Bernice said they grew because the girls had been operated on, like getting bimplants. I told Bernice that was nuts because nobody would have such an operation. But secretly I sort of believed her.

One day we’d seen a scaly girl running down the street in daytime, with a black-suited man chasing her. She sparkled a lot because of her shiny green scales; she’d kicked off her high heels and she was running in her bare feet, dodging in and out among the people, but then she hit a patch of broken glass and fell. The man caught up with her and scooped her up, and carried her back to Scales with her green snakeskin arms dangling down. Her feet were bleeding. Whenever I thought of that, a chill went all through me, like watching someone else cut their finger.

At the back of the alleyway beside Scales there was a small square yard where the trash bins were kept — the ones for the carbon garboil trash and the other kind. Then there was a board fence, and on the other side of it there was a vacant lot where a building had burned down. Now it was just hard earth with pieces of cement and charred wood and broken glass, and weeds growing on it.

Sometimes the pleebrats hung out around there, and they’d jump us when we were emptying the wine bottles. They’d yell, “Goddie, goddie, stinky body” and snatch the pails and run off with them or empty them onto us. That happened to Bernice once and she reeked of wine for days.

Sometimes we went into that vacant lot with Zeb on our Outdoor Classroom days: he said it was the closest thing to a meadow we’d ever find in our pleeb. When he was with us, the pleebland kids didn’t bother us. Zeb was like having your own private tiger: tame to you, savage to everyone else.

Once, we found a dead girl there. She didn’t have any hair or clothes: she only had a few green scales left clinging to her.
Pasted on,
I thought.
Or something. Anyway, not growing. So I was right.

“Maybe she’s sunbathing,” said one of the older boys, and the rest of them snickered.

“Don’t touch her,” said Zeb. “Have some respect! We’ll have our lesson on the Rooftop Garden today.” When we came back for our next Outdoor Classroom, she was gone.

“I bet she’s carbon garboil,” Bernice whispered to me. Carbon garboil was made from any sort of carbon garbage — slaughterhouse refuse, old vegetables, restaurant tossout, even plastic bottles. The carbs went into a boiler, and oil and water came out, plus anything metal. Officially you couldn’t put in human corpses, but the kids made jokes about that. Oil, water, and shirt buttons. Oil, water, and gold pen nibs.

“Oil, water, and green scales,” I whispered to Bernice.

At first glance the vacant lot was empty. No winos, no pleebrats, no dead naked women. Amanda led me over to the far corner, where there was a flat slab of concrete. A syrup bottle was leaning against it, the squeeze kind.

“Look at this,” she said. She’d written her name in syrup on the slab, and a stream of ants was feeding on the letters, so that each letter had an edging of black ants. That was how I first learned Amanda’s name — I saw it written in ants. Amanda Payne.

“Cool, huh?” she said. “Want to write your own name?”

“Why are you doing that?” I said.

“It’s neat,” said Amanda. “You write things, then they eat your writing. So you appear, then you disappear. That way no one can find you.”

Why did this make sense to me? I don’t know, but it did. “Where do you live?” I asked.

“Oh, around,” said Amanda carelessly. That meant she didn’t really live anywhere: she was sleeping in a squat somewhere, or worse. “I used to live in Texas,” she added.

So she was a refugee. A lot of Texas refugees had turned up after the hurricanes and then the droughts. They were mostly illegal. Now I could see why Amanda would be so interested in disappearing.

“You can come and live with me,” I said. I hadn’t planned that, it just came out of my mouth.

At that moment Bernice squeezed through the gap in the fence. She’d relented, she’d returned to collect me, except now I didn’t want her.

“Ren! What’re you
doing!”
she yelled. She came clomping across the vacant lot in that purposeful way she had. I found myself thinking she had big feet, and her body was too square and her nose too small, and her neck ought to be longer and thinner. More like Amanda’s.

“Here comes a friend of yours, I guess,” said Amanda, smiling. I felt like saying,
She’s not my friend,
but I wasn’t brave enough to be that treacherous.

Bernice came up to us, red-faced. She always got red when she was mad. “Come on, Ren,” she said. “You’re not supposed to talk to her.” She spotted Amanda’s jellyfish bracelet, and I could tell she wanted it as much as I did. “You’re evil,” she said to Amanda. “Pleebrat!” She stuck her arm through mine.

“This is Amanda,” I said. “She’s coming to live with me.”

I thought Bernice would fly into one of her rages. But I was giving her my stony-eyed stare, the one that said I wasn’t going to give in. She’d risk losing face in front of a stranger if she pushed too hard, so instead she gave me a silent, calculating look. “Okay then,” she said. “She can help carry the vinegar wine.”

“Amanda knows how to steal things,” I said to Bernice as we trudged back to the Wellness Clinic. I meant this as a peace offering, but Bernice only grunted.

16

I knew I couldn’t really take Amanda home with me like a stray kitten: Lucerne would’ve told me to put her back where I found her, because Amanda was a pleebrat and Lucerne hated pleebrats. According to her they were ruined children, thieves and liars all, and once a child had been ruined it was like a wild dog, it could never be trained or trusted. She was afraid to walk along the street from one Gardener place to another because of the pleebrat gangs that could swarm you and run off with anything they could grab. She never learned about picking up stones and hitting back and yelling. It was because of her earlier life. She was a hothouse flower: that’s what Zeb called her. I used to think this was a compliment, because of the word
flower.

So Amanda would be sent packing, unless I got Adam One’s permission first. He loved people joining the Gardeners, especially kids — he was always going on about how the Gardeners should mould young minds. If he said Amanda should live with us, Lucerne wouldn’t be able to say no.

The three of us found Adam One at the Wellness Clinic, helping to bottle the vinegar. I explained that I’d picked up Amanda — ”gleaned” her, I said — and that she wished to join us, having seen the Light, and could she live at my house?

“Is that true, my child?” Adam One asked Amanda. The other Gardeners had stopped work and were eyeing Amanda’s miniskirt and silver fingers.

“Yes, sir,” said Amanda in a respectful voice.

“She’ll be a bad influence on Ren,” said Nuala, who had come over. “Ren is too easily led. We should place her with Bernice.”

Bernice gave me a triumphant look:
See what you’ve done!
“That would be fine,” she said neutrally.

“No!” I said. “I found her!” Bernice glared at me. Amanda said nothing.

Adam One considered the three of us. He knew a lot of things. “Perhaps Amanda herself should decide,” he said. “She should meet the families in question. That will help to settle the matter. That would be fairest, no?”

“My place first,” said Bernice.

Bernice lived in the Buenavista Condos. The Gardeners didn’t exactly own the building, because ownership was wrong, but somehow they controlled it. It had “Luxury Lofts for Today’s Singles” on it in faded gold lettering, but I knew it wasn’t Luxury: the shower in Bernice’s apartment was clogged, the tiles in the kitchen were cracked and gap-toothed, the ceilings oozed when it rained, the bathroom was slick with mildew.

The three of us went into the lobby, past the middle-aged Gardener lady on security duty there — she was busy with some snarled-up macramé craft object and hardly noticed us. We had to climb six flights of stairs to get to Bernice’s floor because the Gardeners didn’t believe in elevators except for old people and paraplegics. There were forbidden objects in the stairwell — needles, used condoms, spoons, candle ends. The Gardeners said pleeb crooks and thugs and pimps got in at night and used the stairwell for nasty parties; we’d never seen any of these, though we’d once caught Shackie and Croze and their pals drinking wine dregs in there.

Bernice had her own plastikey; she unlocked the door and let us in. The apartment smelled like unwashed clothes left under a dripping sink, or like other kids’ plugged sinuses, or like diapers. Through these odours drifted another one — a rich, fertile, spicy, earthy aroma. Maybe it was wafting up through the hot-air vents from the Gardener mushroom beds in the basement.

But this smell — all the smells — seemed to be coming from Bernice’s mother, Veena, who was sitting on the worn plush-covered sofa as if rooted there, staring at the wall. She had on her usual shapeless dress; her knees were covered with an old yellow baby blanket; her pale hair hung limply on either side of her round, soft, whitish face; her hands lay curled slackly, as if her fingers were broken. On the floor in front of her was a scattering of dirty plates. Veena didn’t cook: she ate what Bernice’s father gave her; or else she didn’t eat it. But she never tidied up. She hardly ever spoke, and she didn’t speak now. Her eyes flickered as we went past her though, so maybe she saw us.

“What’s the matter with her?” Amanda whispered to me.

“She’s Fallow,” I whispered back.

“Yeah?” Amanda whispered. “She just looks really stoned.”

My own mother said Bernice’s mother was “depressed.” But my mother wasn’t a real Gardener, as Bernice was always telling me, because a real Gardener would never say
depressed.
The Gardeners believed that people who acted like Veena were in a Fallow state — resting, retreating into themselves to gain Spiritual insight, gathering their energy for the moment when they would burst out again like buds in spring. They only appeared to be doing nothing. Some Gardeners could remain in a Fallow state for a very long time.

“This is my place,” said Bernice.

“Where would I sleep?” said Amanda.

We were looking at Bernice’s room when Burt the Knob came in. “Where’s my little girl?” he called.

“Don’t answer,” said Bernice. “Close the door!” We could hear him moving around in the main room; then he came into Bernice’s room and scooped her up. He stood there holding her under the armpits. “Where’s my little girl?” he said again, which made me cringe. I’d seen him do this before, not only to Bernice. He just loved girls’ armpits. He’d corner you in behind the bean rows when you were doing slug and snail relocation and pretend to be helping you. Then along would come the hands. He was such a knob.

Bernice was scowling and wriggling. “I’m not your little girl,” she said, which could mean:
I’m not little,
or
I’m not yours,
or even
I’m not a girl.
Burt took this as a joke.

“Then where’s my little girl gone?” he repeated in a woebegone voice.

“Put me down,” Bernice shouted. I felt sorry for her, and also I felt lucky — because whatever I felt about Zeb, it wasn’t embarrassment.

“I’d like to look at your place now,” said Amanda. So the two of us went back down the stairs, leaving Bernice behind us, redder and angrier than ever. I did feel bad about that, but not bad enough to give up Amanda.

Lucerne wasn’t pleased to find that Amanda had been added to our family, but I told her that Adam One had ordered it; so what could she do? “She’ll have to sleep in your room,” she said crossly.

“She won’t mind,” I said. “Will you, Amanda?”

“No, indeed,” said Amanda. She had a very polite manner she could put on, as if she was the one doing you the favour. It grated on Lucerne.

“And she’ll have to get rid of those flashy clothes,” said Lucerne.

“But they aren’t worn out yet,” I said innocently. “We can’t just throw them away! That would be wasteful!”

“We’ll sell them,” said Lucerne tightly. “We can certainly use the money.”

“Amanda should get the money,” I said. “They’re her clothes.”

“It’s okay,” said Amanda, softly but regally. “They didn’t cost me anything.” Then we went into my cubicle and sat on the bed, and laughed behind our hands.

When Zeb got back that evening, he had no comment at first. We all ate dinner together, and Zeb chewed away at the soybit and green bean casserole and watched Amanda with her graceful neck and silver fingers picking daintily away at what was on her plate. She hadn’t yet taken off her gloves. Finally he said to her, “You’re a sly little operator, aren’t you?” It was his friendly voice, the one he used for saying, “Atta girl” at dominoes.

Lucerne, who was dishing him out a second helping, stiffened in mid-motion, the big spoon straight up in the air like some kind of metal detector. Amanda gazed at him straight-faced, with her eyes wide open. “Excuse me, sir?”

Zeb laughed. “You’re very good,” he said.