My Community of Equals was reduced to the lovebirds Esther and Chan, plus me, the third wheel. We weren't the moral majority any more. We weren't any kind of majority. I couldn't tell which went first – the majority or the morals. Omar dropped off dog biscuits all the time but I could never make him stay. I was always worried, always clutching my tummy, saying motherly stuff to Omar and Chan like "Take a jersey if you go out" and "Let me know where you are and when you'll be back" and shit like that. My tummy ached for two hours each morning. It was funny how precise my body was. Nothing else in my life was that reliable.
I would hunt and gather with Watson once or twice a week, chasing guinea pigs under the rose bushes in the botanic gardens til the fat little critters fell into a pit one by one. I would tinker with animal skins. Esther and I would stuff the skins with pulverised guts, twist and tie the tops like balloons and call them sausages. While out with Watson, I would ask him what King Adam was up to, and he would tell me frankly. Watson was visiting Adam's corner once a week. He said he was making observations, like he could just flit between the dark side and the light. He said Heart of Darkness was "uninspired," reckoned his friend had become boring. Lethargic was a word he used. I think he meant decadent. Fat, indulged, pompous. A blob dispensing orders and dollars.
Putting together what I could see with my binoculars app and intel from Watson, I worked out Adam had covered over an entire street. His women sewed for him constantly – after all, BP sold emergency repair and patch kits which included needles and thread – and with enough stitches and staples and rivets and duct tape, 50 bedsheets could be joined to create vast shade sails.
'They don't appreciate being watched. Through your binoculars, that is.'
'Well they've been watching ME since day one, so they can go to hell. And recording.'
'I probably shouldn't tell you,' Watson said, 'They know how to get into the sewer.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning the sewer's navigable, but you would hardly want to bump into any megafauna down there.'
'What's megafauna?'
'You don't want to know, Eden.'
'Is the water… good… down there?'
Watson shrugged. 'There's been no pollution, has there. It's humans who pollute.'
I thought about this over days. We'd scoured Moneyland, picked it clean – the western half, that is. There were secrets over in Adam's corner. I mean, I'd never seen what was behind the BP, in the BP's shipping container which stored pumps, tools, equipment. Diesel. Food.
'He has a project he'd like to discuss with you,' Watson said one afternoon as we were walking across the bowling green, returning to dinner-camp with a bag of finches. Watson had found a pot of treacle, so old it was like eating tar, but it stuck to the log we'd spread it on with a butter knife and we'd pressed walnuts into the treacle and we had sat back, him with a colander, me with a sieve, and watched 20, 30, 35 finches land, peck at the walnuts, and find their feet stuck. My stomach purred. I'd never thought I would love seeing critters struggle before I broke their necks. Their pain meant I lived. And my baby.
'You're not curious about the project, Eden?'
'God no. Literally everything that comes out of Slug Boy's mouth is dangerous. My people don't want it.'
'That's not leadership, Eden. You have to put it to your people. Let them vote. That's democracy.'
We reached Chan, opened the rubbish bag to show him our catch and two finches flitted away. Watson tied the bag and squeezed the oxygen out. We were having ortolan again. Ortolan used to be a delicacy so esteemed in regal France that there was a ritual behind it, Watson the History Professor told me – you baked the bird in its own fat, put a cloth over your head to hide your gluttonous shame from God, and scoffed the entire bird in one mouthful, crunching the bones. The texture was crunchy as hokey pokey, the meat was as sweet as peanut butter. The roasted beak broke between your teeth like the lid of a crème brulee. It was pretty yummy although ortolan became boring and routine after six or seven meals. I would rather have been somewhere with people I could relax with. My friends weren't people I looked forward to seeing anymore. Dinner time was like a counselling session for drug addicts, everybody fidgety and nervous, especially Chan, who'd become a bony old skeleton with a scraggly beard. Watson's stories always started out interesting, but they would end feeling like you'd had a spear pushed down your spine. He told us about something called hyper-inflation in some country called Zimbabwe where prices went so spastic they printed a hundred trillion dollar bill. He told us about Easter Island, a tropical paradise where a tiny population couldn't get along so they ravaged the environment then destroyed one another and left the place deserted.
We returned to camp with mushrooms and sparrows plus some sorrel and strawberries we found on the way home. I kicked over a shoebox and a little gang of crickets scuttled away in four directions. I scooped them up. They tasted like cold snot on cornflakes.
Chan tossed a few fistfuls of hazelnuts in a pan and put them on the hot rocks to roast, then smacked the sack of birds against the ground, to silence the flapping and tweeting, took a car antenna skewer and pushed it through the throat of one bird, then two, three, eventually skewering 15 until there was no more room on the antenna. We could have the rest of the ortolan for breakfast. Then we would go out and catch more. If the little buntings went extinct, we didn't care.
When the birds were roasting, Chan said in a tired voice, 'He came by here while you guys were off getting sticky with the birds.' I studied Chan's body as he spoke. He'd lost the muscle he had started with. His face was angular now, his eyes hard and mean, and always tired. There was something furry about his skin, and he often threw up after dinner. The sun glinted in his hair a little. He was going slightly grey. 'The King wants a monument built.'
'A sphinx, Stonehenge, what? Mt Rushmore, I bet. Is that what he wants? His face carved into rock? And don't call him king.'
He took the skewer off the flames, pulled a bird off, bit its head and chewed, then spat into the fire. 'Two more minutes. The building project? It's a little out-there.'
'Charging a million dollars for an adrenaline injector pen when somebody is dying right in front of you, that's out-there. What does he want?'
'Something big. Like BIG-big.'
I breathed deeply, accepted an ortolan, swallowed the bubbling fat, took the crumpled steaming wad of baby bones out of my mouth and played with the spitty skeleton. 'A statue. Okay. What's he giving us in return?'
'Not a statue.'
We chewed our dinner in silence, popping hazelnuts into our mouths every thirty seconds. We sipped water with hunks of lemon in it.
'Well the pyramids took, like, 10,000 slaves to build… .'
'Actually those who built the pyramids were paid to do so,' Watson corrected me.
'Whatever. We don't have decades. We have eight months. Sooo….? You guys aren't thinking of saying yes, are you?'
Chan leaned into my face. Esther rolled up. She too looked down on me. 'Do you guys remembers those chocolates, Ferrero Rocher? The ones with nuts on the outside and crunchy inner made of wafer?'
My stomach burbled. I had a flashback to scoffing a whole box of Ferrero Rocher at Christmas then vomiting them so I wouldn't put on weight. 'What's your poin– OH MY GOD you have one.'
Chan held the golden delicacy in front of me. I didn't dare touch it. Then he released it into my hands. I didn't stop to worship it. I bit deep into it, picking the foil out of my teeth as I munched it. Brown drool ran down my lips. I wiped the chocolate sludge from my mouth with the back of my hand, licked the back of my hand, and polished off the rest of the chocolate.
My Equals were watching me like dogs.
'He came by while I was gathering? And you let him GIVE you this? Are there more of these?'
'And Mountain Dew,' Esther said, white-eyed, as if she were relating the existence of Jesus.
'And Twinkies.'
'And Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, man.'
My face crumpled. 'It's so hard. It's TOO hard. I can't do this any more, this-this-this fighting.'
The tiny seahorse behind my belly button did a somersault.
Chan squeezed my shoulder with his old man claws. 'You wouldn't really be working for him. You'd be working for yourself.'
'Eden, don't, wait– '
'I'm going to talk to him. Now.'
*
I strutted all the way through the mansions and onto Broadway without looking behind me. Then I turned and checked out my shadow. A spirit made of my own anxiety was following me.
I cut down to Mahony Road, paused beside Wade's Wharf Road, feeling alone, out in the country. I saw a hedgehog scuttling along the gutter. I stomped its head, memorised its location. I would return to eat it after my mission.
My legs got heavier as I approached Heart of Darkness, trying to toughen myself up by chanting this quote from Aung San Suu Kyi where she said "If you do nothing, you get nothing." Aung San Suu Kyi is one of my favourites. Actually, she's DOCTOR Aung San Suu Kyi, and she's a Daw, which means she's like aunty of the nation. Like, she could have stayed in Oxford and never gone home to Burma to confront the junta, but she stayed staunch and graceful and SOOOOO pretty, AND she continued getting Nobel Peace Prizes and kicking butt and being a role model even when she was stuck living in a tiny little space. On home detention.
A lot like me.
I kept wanting to turn back. I felt my thighs tingling with fear as I passed the library and the shut-up supermarket, which blocked out the sky. I stood on a manhole cover and felt the shadow of the bedsheet canopy fall on me. It was like a market in Morocco with strange exotic dangers in the shade up ahead.
Maeve was the first to react. She was sitting on a barrel, stitching two bedsheets together, and I startled her and she scurried toward the dark core of Adam's compound, the petrol station, with a single vehicle with its face pointing out at me, two headlights like evil eyes. KT was the next to see me and stop and look at me with terror. She had a blade and had been cutting the cling film off a stack of boxes. There was a trail of crumpled cling film leading from the manhole to where she was. The manhole cover was slightly ajar. The sewers of this place could have contained anything, I supposed. There could be crocodiles down there, popping out every night. I would have eaten crocodile if it satisfied my stomach. I would have killed it, too. I would do anything to feed my baby.
'Don't run,' I called out to KT as she recoiled. She pointed her blade at me for a moment, then did the opposite of what I'd told her to do. As soon as she made it inside the BP, Anya came out, stomping across the forecourt and onto a road which had been entirely covered up with carpet, frazzled at the edges where it had been cut and ripped and pulled off houses and dragged here.
'Don't do anything crazy, Anya. I just want to talk.'
'You want to talk, you send message.'
'I want to do things responsibly. Bring him out here, please. I need to talk over this pyramid thing. As a matter of fact, I need to talk about wider issues as well.'
'Your friend, they work with you,' Anya said. 'I am thinkingk they most hungry than you, no? Most ambition?'
'I will provide guidance,' Eli said, emerging from the hardware store. My heart slammed against its rib cage. I hadn't thought about Eli since he'd gone.
'So we got a message from your boss. Don't you think getting a pyramid built in your honour's a little weird, Eli? Oi: bring him out here, would you? He can't be that busy. What does he do all day anyway?' Hunger had entered my lungs. I had to make demands to feed my body. 'ADAM TURING! GET YOUR BUTT OUT HERE THIS INSTANT.'
Anya folded me into a headlock and began marching me up the carpeted road. 'GET OUT HERE, YOU COWARD. FACE ME. ADAM. ADAAAAAM!'
I managed to twist around, and there he was, a small plump black shape with thin shoulders shrouded by a childish hoodie, looking out from the gas station, backlit. Behind the black figure I could see white space in the drinks cabinet and the cardboard displays which should've been packed with chocolate and candy. Not as much food as there used to be. Before Anya mashed her fingers over my eyes, I glimpsed Adam's face. His cheeks had become balls of fat. His arms seemed tinier, his torso rounder. A chubby black beetle, cloaked in shadow.
'TELL HIM I'LL DO IT,' I said as Anya hauled me to the border of Adam's realm. 'His monument. His cocky-ass vain pile of horseshit. I'll do it. For a mil. One million. You tell him.'
'You come over to the king employing.'
'Make HIM come HERE. I'M sensible. I'M in charge.'
'You're a failure.' It was Adam's voice, grown thicker and wetter, as if his tongue had become fat too. Eli and KT and Maeve approached holding him on – on some sort of plank, with canvas – it was a stretcher. God knew where it had come from – Lollipoppa's daycare? Palanquin, that was the word. King Adam's carriers didn't seem strong – they were struggling with the weight – but their bodies showed plenty of potential for strength. Eli had grown a belly. Maeve's eyes were creased and tiny with the fat on her face, and her forearms. KT, still wearing that bikini she must have thought was distinctive, had strips of fat creasing her tummy, and her calves were thick and wide. I could even see fat pressing against her toes.
King Adam didn't sit up, but Eli shoved a fresh cushion under his head, elevating his view and his voice. 'You want a million?'
'You took a million from me when I was weak and desperate.'
'It was nine hundred thousand dollar,' Anya growled, and pressed her forehead against mine until I'd backed away a metre. 'Every word which is come from your mouth, it is a lie.'
'You can stand aside, Anya,' Adam rasped, then sat up. 'I will handle this threat. Eden: you need to know this is a land with a justice code, a land of law and order. You'd be well advised to watch your conduct. I won't hesitate to prosecute you.'
'I'll work for you, but I won't bow down and worship you. Tegla Loroupe had a man who tried to tell her to quit, but she kept on going. And she was the best runner in the whole world AND a leader of her country AND she got her tribes to stop fighting.'
Maeve and KT winced and repositioned their grip on the stretcher handles.
'You'll worship justice? You'll worship a government? Because here, Eden Shepherd, the government is ME.'
King Adam made a gesture, and Maeve handed a loaf of cookie dough to Anya, who jabbed it into my chest. 'The king, he say Arbeit Macht Frei. It means –
'I KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.'