All Year
To Go
We trapped eels in laundry baskets.
We ate oranges til diarrhoea ran down our legs.
We snapped the necks of guinea pigs scampering around Lollipoppa's Play Centre.
We lay on top of rabbit warrens dangling little nooses. We tried to have fun in between but something always ruined it.
We gathered all the board games in the land.
We played Mah Jong by the river, Yahtzee in motel rooms, played Uno on the big ABC mat in the daycare centre. We squabbled heaps as we played. Every game managed to make us uneasy. Hungry Hungry Hippos implied we were once the hippoes, and now we were hollow plastic. Operation reminded us of dead bodies. The first move advantage in chess brought up Adam, made us paranoid and snappy. Even Monopoly reminded us of how much power and wealth King Worm sat on.
We threw the board games on our bonfire and watched the plastic pieces sag then erupt into green flame and we went back to survival. Watson tried to convince us our ancestors used to spend literally 50 percent of the day gathering food. We wanted to feel ripped off, wanted to feel like we had an unfair deal, but then Watson would come in with another fact, another stat, and we would shut up and hunt.
No matter how bad it hurt, scraping together each meal, Watson convinced us our ancestors had it tougher. Older peoples had to chew through seed cases. They had grit in their oysters, dirt in their celery, tough black hairs in their pork. They couldn't afford to discard the squelchy, disgusting parts of every chicken, pig, pigeon. They had to eat spleens, kidneys, lungs, stomach. Only kings got the good stuff.
Omar showed up. He hugged some of us; others, like Esther, he just couldn't get along with. Omar wasn't having any revelations here. This place hadn't changed him at all. He still thought all girls had cooties except me. He said something about chinchillas on the north end of Junction Road. He could've been mistaken, he said, but he was 99 per cent sure he'd seen a chinchilla, somebody's former pet, unless it was just a grey slipper…
'Didn't you ever read Wind in the Willows, like where all the animals come out at dusk?' he asked me, hee-hawing as he traded five dead pigeons for some of the eels that Eli had smoked in an old metal filing cabinet.
'Course I did. I just didn't realise all of my childhood literature was supposed to be a hunting manual.'
Omar kissed both my hands, making fun of me, like he was greeting a queen. 'Wait til you check out White Fang. I never knew how to take out mooses before my teacher aide read Jack London to me. White Fang's gangsta. Oh – speaking of treats.' Omar unzipped a Dora the Explorer backpack and pulled out some small yellow tubs.
'It's salt and carbohydrate flour!' he said, looking delighted. He took a wad of Play-Doh, rubbed his hands along it and whittled into a sausage-shape. 'Here: made you a doughnut.'
I didn't even flinch. I hadn't flinched over anything in weeks. I'd gobbled worms, crickets, beetles, butterflies. I roasted mice and ate them five at a time.
I chewed Omar's rainbow-coloured Play-Doh and stared at Adam's camp through my binoculars app, a window which hovered in front of me and clarified the view, magnifying like 3000 metres of distance. I always saw Adam's arrogant BP sign lit up as if to say We're Open, Come Inside, the generator pointlessly chewing through diesel, wasting electricity. I spotted Adam himself just a couple of times on the forecourt of the BP, lying on an inflatable lilo from a swimming pool, sunglasses blacking his eyes, beanie pulled down low, nose up in the air as if he were an animal sniffing for threats. I could hear the faint megaphone-ish sound of voices coming through the forecourt speakers. I think he was listening to recordings of people being mean to him, as if it inspired him.
It appeared Adam had taken all the bungy ties, cables, string, yarn, rolled-up towels and fixed these to the roof of the BP before securing them across the street. His workers began draping cloth and fabric over the ropes so there was a shade canopy around the BP. Before he blotted out my view, I got glimpses of my old friends eating these skanky service station hotdogs that I used to hate, that I used to refuse when my dad made a pitstop especially to buy me one (I only ever asked dad to buy me mints so my breath wouldn't stink while I starved to try hit 70 pounds).
I drooled as I perved on people eating microwaved buns with steaming frankfurters from a mile away, my breath smelled more awful than ever, and my joints stuck out, and my skin was rubbery and covered in fine white hairs.
I wondered if Adam was sleeping with the girls who worked for him. I wondered if he'd told them I let him sleep with me a hundred hungry weeks ago.
I wondered if the thing inside me was going to grow up to be like its daddy.
*
We ripped the grass off this manhole cover inside the park, but no one could open it. Eli prayed for ages and God did nothing. Chan pulled all the grass and dirt away from the rim of the cover. Kane wailed on it with rocks til the rocks crumbled and he had to go soak his hands in water.
Underground. That's where unexplained things were. When the surface got too awful to endure, we fantasised about underground. If we could just get down into the sewer, scope it to make sure the pipes were big enough to crawl through, point our asses in the right direction… man, we'd take a day's crawling through poop if it meant we emerged with a million bucks on a pristine campus. Two months had been bad, yeah, but money would make it all vanish.
My hundred thousand? That'd help heal some hurt. And surely the mechs wouldn't just watch one of us die. The law wasn't far away. Rules. Intervention.
But then there was Fatima.
Kane started clawing the earth away then he started babbling about making a port or a canal or something, some word he was struggling with. Kane was better at actions than words. He attacked the ground with every tool except a spade for eight days before he allowed himself to relax and stand back and appreciate the tens of metres of dirt he'd scraped out. Cooking pots, a hammer, a hockey stick, metal serving spoons – he used what he could. He'd dug from near the manhole cover west out to the river, and the river was acting like it was interested, with gravity causing the water to trickle its nose in towards Kane's canal, as if the river was sniffing the project.
After a week and a half of hacking at the earth, Kane one day told Chan to take a Number One in it. 'It's a real life toilet, with water coming in and out,' he said, 'Just hurry up and bloody use it. It's plumbed, bro.'
What Kane had done was miraculous. Construction meant we could go to the moon if we wanted. Construction meant we could find a way out of here.
We dug out a rubbish pit, a compost pit, and a network of gravity-fed canals so we had plumbed water. We dug out the earth, envisioning a sink for washing food, a well full of drinking water we would filter out of the river then boil clean, and of course Kane's toilet pool, bidet pool and – at the end of many purification filters, deep inside the reserve – a hole for our spa pool.
No one ever said it was permanent, but that was the feeling. We smashed up every wooden fence within a mile radius so we could keep the fire going non-stop to give us hot rocks for the cooking water. We stopped feeling guilty about kicking out the walls of houses and ripping the wood out and stomping deck furniture to smithereens for the bonfire we had to keep going 24-7. For boiling water clean. For roasting mice and trying to pretend we were Roman emperors as we nibbled their tiny skinned carcasses. For keeping intruders away at night.
'I'm gonna conquer that river, you guys,' Kane said, squatting beside the fire, picking grey fluff off his chinchilla ribs, having a huge feed after a day of rearranging mud. 'Gonna build me some Aqua Ducks, yo.'
Watson began saying 'Aqueducts,' got as far as saying, 'Aqua' then shut up. 'An impressive initiative,' Watson said instead, clearing his throat. 'Tell us more.'
Kane's plan, he said as he rested his muscles on his favourite digging stick, was to line the trench with rocks and mosquito net and holding pools. Omar had told Kane to filter yucky water through his socks, but since Kane had long ago turned his socks into gloves, he'd blown up the idea. Six stages of rocks and net would filter out particles from the river water by pushing the water through fabric sheets. At the final stage, three main ponds would be set up – one for drinking water, one for bathing water, one for cleaning. There would be a plank, acting as a gate, which could release our dirty water into the latrines. All the gross latrine water could be flushed out by releasing another gate so it would get sucked downstream.
We got more and more excited about finding new rocks to heat the spa.
'And we can have Māori hangi for dinner every night!' Esther squealed.
'Hot tub twice a day, that's me. You chuck the rocks in a skillet, tip the hot rocks into the bathing pool: bingo. Warm water. You'd pay, what, eight billion bucks for a Finnish day spa wouldn't ya? I'll let yous in mine for just a thousand bucks a bath.'
'No, you'll share your gift and we'll pay you with food,' Eli corrected him.
'I built most of it myself, motherfucker.'
'Yeah? Do the people who built your streetlights send you a bill every time you walk down the street at night?'
'Shut up, boys,' Esther said. 'Boss, what do you think?'
'I hate it when you call me that.'
She gave me a mean smile. 'You shouldn't've stood up to Adam if you didn't want to be Leader.'
*
Ten layers of gates made of For Sale signs and plywood and tabletops kept the river out while we lined the various ponds and wells with any plastic we could find around the land. Kane tore down lace curtains from houses and set up three gates of netting which the water would have to pass through. One lock would be full of charcoal, the next would have hot rocks to boil bacteria to death. Kane used shoelaces to tie the corners of the netting to sticks which we bashed into the ground with clubs like cavemen. Each stage of filtration would concentrate the water through a square the size of a car bonnet.
Me and Chan and Eli and Esther worked under Kane, giving him power without discussion or argument, giving Kane this thing, this word Watson had taught me, 'Deference.' He was the foreman; we moved mud and rocks and found things to eat. We even made Kane actually smile one day when Esther pointed out how easy it was to make popcorn from all that corn we were sick of, and Kane, determined to make it "man-size," popped enough to fill a pillowcase and we sat around that night with our eyes closed, holding popcorn in front of our faces, smelling it, recalling movies we promised to watch as soon as we were out of here.
Digging catchments and dams helped pass the time. The simpleness of it made us feel useful. The year passed a little quicker. We'd each lost several kilos each – the boys were the worst, with all the flesh dropping off their chests – and it always looked like someone had given us black eyes, and our lips were always spiky with flakes of skin and the boys grew beards which itched constantly and made them look like old hermits from the Bible (except Watson, he wasn't manly enough to grow anything.) We starved and our teeth stuck out and our heads looked oversized and we had this gross downy fur sprouting out of our arms and our tummies bulged (mine bulged more than anyone's)
Our bodies complained but didn't die.
Each day was three blocks of time in which I wasn't fed, wrapped around two hurried sessions of eating, the 10am breakfast and 4pm dinner. When I slept, I dreamed of crisp fries covered in salt which clung to the oily chip surface, and when you bit into the fry, you found gooey potato inside. Hopeful dreams made waking life more painful, though. Those three hungry periods a day, multiplied by 365, were like 1000 days of starvation. I stroked my ribs and mourned my old body. I mourned Fatima. I mourned my nine hundred thousand bucks. I had messed up so goddamn bad, and the worst part was I wouldn't even get in trouble. None of us would. Fatima was a cat without a collar hit by a car somewhere remote. Get rid of the body and carry on without consequences.
Three hungry periods.
Hungry.
No period. It should've come already.
*
Eli was happy to handle trades with the dark side. He wouldn't condemn them. King Adam's women spent some of the day guarding checkpoints they'd set up at road junctions 800 metres or 1200 metres from the petrol station. Maeve was some kind of a guard now and she wielded a broken-off table leg with a sharpened bolt sticking out of it. Eli came back from trading one day with a washing basket full of lemons perched on his head like an African villager and reported that outside the library, KT had jabbed a garden hoe at him – its tip flashing in the sun, sharpened – and told him he couldn't come any further. Even though they collected money for Pink Shirt Day together like only three months back, she treated him like a stranger. Eden is the wrong god to worship. Some bullshit policy like that.
Me and most of the Equals stopped going past Junction Road, that became our cut-off, the end of our half of the country. That road came to divide east from west. We focused on helping Kane with the hardest part of the canal project: tearing off the grass and topsoil so he could make his trenches and canals perfect. We used blunt steak knives to cut through the grass roots. We hacked out the grass with oven trays. We wore skiing mittens for gloves. We got through the work steadily, working constantly, sweat dripping off our noses, inspired by the river of silty brown water, driven by thirst.
One afternoon when we were building up a small mountain of garden rocks Watson said something about how he wished he had an elemental convertor right now. The technical lingo he was using made Kane go spastic.
'Glad there's none of those mech scumbags in here,' Kane said, kicking bark. 'Kidnapping sonsabitches.'
'Correction: nobody was brought here against their will, were they now. Or did you have a unique experience?' Watson stroked his boyish, hairless jaw. 'I'd suggest you followed your greed and this is where the path culminated.'
'Prove you're not a mech then, brainbox. Cut the skin off your hands and we'll see if it's sensors inside.'
'I'd rather have sensors than be insensitive.'
'BOYS. Everyone just… just breathe.'
'Careful or she'll chuck a million bucks at ya,' Esther smirked.
That stung – anything a girl said stung way worse than a boy – but I swallowed it. 'BOYS. Seriously. Fight tonight. Fight later. Just not when you're hungry. Come out of the trench. We're having a break. That's an order. NOW.'
They all glared at me with their mouths puckered into hard little beaks.
We went to bed on the trampoline early, lying on our backs watching the digital stars, taking turns to speak. I wanted badly to turn on 50 Fierce Females and read on my org holoscreen through the night but it would creep people out. We enjoyed this bedtime story from Kane about how he would test his water filter. He couldn't wait to kick out the main brace, a piece of wood that was keeping the river water from flowing into his water filter plant. Kane was going to pretend the brace was Adam's ugly face.
One of us said through the sleepy darkness, 'Would you take him out? Like if we all put together like a million bucks?'
Somebody finally spoke after a long empty hole in the night.
'Is that your highest offer?'