A rotten fish landed on my head. It made a rubbery squish as I rolled awake, my knee crushing it so its guts spurted out its mouth.
They were standing over me, the whole gang of them – Anya, KT, Maeve – even King Adam, tossing fish at us.
'You sleep here no more,' Anya said, kicking my friends awake. 'This will be foundation of monument.' The Jeep was rumbling on the grass. I could see the snout of the dog inside it. It looked a little raw and bloody, like someone had been smacking it around. Plenty of muscle on its bones. I could get 6000 calories by eating that beast.
'Pyramid, you mean,' I said, blinking out the sun and picking crusty bits from my eyelashes.
'King Adam, he do not like this term. Hey: after fish, you can have guinea peeg,' Anya said, picking up the dead fish and rubbing it against my face. 'You are filthy animal. Look at you with fat belly. Like hump of the hunchback is in your belly.'
My stomach cringed, I bent over, looking for a place to puke. I was sick every morning these days.
King Adam chuckled as he watched me vomit. He was standing but it appeared KT and Maeve were holding him upright. 'A hearty congratulations.'
'Congratulations for what?' I wiped the acid-scum from my lips.
He eyed my tummy. 'You know for what.'
'Got any tampons?' Maeve went. Her nose was up in the air. 'It's just that we're out. And you don't seem to be using a whole lot of tampons, do you. Can't wait to hear your explanation for that.'
'Listen, you got a plan for this folly of yours or not?'
'You're the only one who might build a folly, Eden, and if you do, you'll be breaching the terms of your contract. Could land you in court.'
'What court?'
'MY COURT. I'd watch the attitude, if I were you. PLANS. ELI. PUT THE PLANS HERE.'
On the back of one of those For Sale signs from someone's lawn, the plan had been drawn with a marker pen, yet another fancy object my Community of Equals hadn't seen in forever. The plan showed that the whole fort would be surrounded by earth. Once the earth was sculpted into a hill or pyramid and compacted, you could probably walk or climb up any side of the pyramid, providing it had a ladder or some stairs. The top of the fort was the apex of the pyramid. There was to be a shaft around the fireman's pole so the sun could beam into the vault within. The whole thing would be three storeys tall.
Eli and Chan and me crowded our heads together as we studied the plans. I said we could get the base a couple metres high pretty quick if we just pushed cars against the bottom of the fort and Eli said King Adam wouldn't object, so long as the sides of the pyramid were dirt with a walkway running up to the top of the thing. When the cars were tipped on their sides they could easily be filled with dirt. They were like metal frames. Reinforced boxes. Empty cubes. The second storey could be bulked up with recycling bins and plastic boxes and desks and tables and mattresses, once again with dirt over top. The third level would be something light enough to haul up there without a crane – say cardboard boxes, maybe – covered with earth. Four ladders would be pressed into the four sides to let people get up to the top and down.
'So when am I gonna get my million?'
Anya threw a $10,000 wad at me. 'You have maximum 30 days; ten thousand dollar for one day, no more.'
'And what if I don't?'
'YOUR PARENTS'LL STARVE,' Chan growled, the skin peeling back from his skeletal gums. 'Our folks need the money bad as we do. My mama needs a cataracts operation. Listen, Adz, man, you gotta give me something to eat, man, I can't eat dumb river fish any more man, you broke me, alright, you win, just gimme something to –
Anya shoved Chan onto his back. He whimpered like a beaten dog. 'DO NOT APPROACH THE KING.' Anya walked to the Jeep, brought back a box of crackers, ripped the box open and poured the crackers over Chan's body. He gasped and twitched and made little wiffling sounds as he crammed the unbroken whole crackers into his mouth first, then scooped up the broken ones, then snuffled up the dust and chunks, licking the wooden boards, disgracing us all. Adam chuckled to himself, recording the pathetic Chan with the camera on his org.
Anya threw a small bottle of water at me and fished a PopTart out of her pocket. 'You have been first payment. Now begeen.'
*
Six dead-end cul de sacs backed onto Samuel Miller Reserve. Every cul de sac had cars in it. It chilled me, most mornings, to awake and see those cars there and think, just for a second, Thank heavens it was all a dream, and then to realise not a single car was moving. No smoke from cold chimneys. No breeze.
I went to see which cars we should move first. I took an alleyway I'd never been through then I came out into fresh houses, houses I'd never seen. We thought we'd scraped out a pretty accurate map of Moneyland in the moist hard sand at the bottom of the sandpit, marking all the important stuff with shells and bits of wood, but there were new spots to chart every week. Watson was the only one who had the map app installed on his organiser. It was possible that inside a single house in a single black spot street was a freezer full of Kentucky fried chicken, kept cool because it was hooked up to a solar panel, or maybe there was a cupboard full of candy canes, or marshmallows. Even sachets of powdered juice would have made us happy. Canned soup. Green beans. Asparagus in tins of sugary brine. Brussels god damn sprouts. All the disgusting veges I used to mash under my plate so Mumshine would think I'd eaten it and let me leave the table.
I rested my weight against some old rich dude's deep green Jaguar with tan leather seats and worked on breathing, clutching my belly with one hand.
180ish days. A billion cells coalescing per day to grow a fertilised egg into a tadpole complete with tail, then that tadpole would grab its knees, curl and twist, grow a billion cells the next day, another billion the next. Baby shower. Hope. Little booties. Burnt cheeks and tears of joy. Squeezing Chan's fingers as we watched a glowing monitor to see if in my tummy he'd given me a boy or a girl.
'EDE!' Esther bumped me with her wheel. 'You must've been dreaming about something pretty special. Care to share?'
'I was, uh… .' I turned my stomach away from Esther and Chan. The two seemed to be getting pissed at each other. 'Let's just build that gremlin's little Lego set already.'
We walked and wheeled down the street til we found a brick-shaped Toyota Hiace. 'Perfect,' Chan said through his bucked teeth, which seemed to stick out more and more like fangs. He wiped his brow with his billowy giant Ca$h Money Billionaire$ shirt. 'How we gonna move this thing?'
The driver door was unlocked. In the movies, they always show the keys stashed inside the sun visor. We didn't find anything like that. We groped the car, massaged and tickled it for five minutes, and watched Chan angle his body at 45 degrees, toes pointed in the concrete, hands urging the vehicle to move, before I called a conference at the bonnet.
'Chan, what's up with you? You haven't even undone the hand brake. And Esther – are you sure you don't mind… ?'
'What, just because you're a boyfriend-burglar you think I don't wanna get paid?'
I took a deep breath. Screw Esther. I wouldn't flinch.
'Tell me what happened to your money, Chan.'
He didn't respond, at first.
'I know something happened to your money. You seem depressed as anything. You can tell me. Our community fell apart cause of secrets. Don't keep secrets from me.'
'Can we start building the dumb pyramid already?'
'TELL ME.'
'I SOLD THE CHAIR. There, boss? You happy?'
'When? How? Like, Esther's IN her chair… ?'
They looked at each other deeply. Esther kissed Chan's neck and he flopped his big ugly head onto her. Flakes of dandruff spilled out of his hair.
It began a month ago.
'I wanted the money so god damn bad, Ede.' Chan shook his head as if he'd seen some real bad terrorist attack on the news. 'You got no idea.' Chan checked over both shoulders for Anya. 'We went over to his place in the middle of the night – like that was the only time of day Queen Eden wasn't telling us all what to do – and we said Hell yeah. We can do a deal.'
'What the actual fuck? You're sitting in your chair? And Adam's nothing, why would you give him–
'Pizza,' said Esther, 'Hot pizza, with bacon.'
'The cheese was steaming, Ede. You should've seen it.' Chan's stomach let out a sound like a bubble popping in a well. 'Adam has a microwave. He has frozen food. He can cook all sorts of stuff thanks to that generator he's got. Hot dogs, pies, corn dogs, burritos. God, his gas station, it's like… it's like a mall, okay? I scoffed two whole pizzas, tried to scoff a third –
'Chan puked,' Esther said. Her mouth laughed, but the rest of her face was cold, disappointed. 'All that pizza, wasted.'
'Adam and Anya and everyone, they didn't think it was funny. There was still some food in my tummy and Chan's tummy, and we tried to clean it up, like we grabbed toilet tissue and a bottle of cleaner, but, like – '
'Anya handed us a … God, I'm bummed out just sayin it.' Chan, his eyes inches above the concrete, shook his head ruefully. 'She handed us a bill. Literally, like a bill she printed off from the cash register. This is as I'm trying to clean up my puke, Anya's trying to break my wrist. Tries to tell me the tissue paper's $20,000 and the Spray & Wipe's fifty grand. Then KT comes in all bubbly and stuff, tries telling us there's an eighty thousand dollar fine for soiling King Adam's land. "Defiling" was the word she used. You defiled the realm of the king apparently. Those people are schizo, man. How'd they even get so… ?'
I stared Chan hard in the eyes, but he wasn't reflecting. He still couldn't see we'd given Adam his power.
'How much, dude? How much did you sell the chair for?'
Chan wept. It was pathetic. He couldn't stop licking the tears off his furry lip. His body needed the salt. 'So we're in heaven, pretty much, right – I mean, Adam's compound, you know, there's enough canned chicken soup to eat it every day for a ye – for a yeee - .' He stopped and caught his breath, snorting streams of snot onto the ground from his nostrils, 'For a year.'
'And chips, Eden. Doritos, Twisties, Burger Rings, Rashuns, Pringles –
' –FritoLays, Shapes, southern style crispy old fashioned chips with the fatty bubbles on them… .'
'Here's Adam with a whole Red Bull fridge of chocolate milk and can you even remember how good gingernuts taste when you soak 'em in milk and –
'I got six hundred and fifty thousand for Esther's chair. We haggled, standing around a puddle of… God it hurts just to remember it. I tossed Esther over my shoulder and we left pretty happy, right? I had Esther over one half of my body and over the half, I'm carrying a sack of money. It was in a laundry bag. I mean this money, just the weight of it, Ede, y'know? It weighed as much as her. And I couldn't take it. I broke down – we weren't far from home, it must've been 5.30 in the morning and I was seriously so excited, like SO excited, like I was the richest playa in Mahonyland and I wouldn't have to eat rats any more. Literally. But I ran out of energy. Give me food, I throw it up. Give me money –
'Too heavy,' I said, nodding.
'Right. Too heavy. So I find a crib with a nice roof, real thick tiles, triple glazed windows, the place even had a… like even the garage was fancy, Eden. They had a woodpile so here's me knocking down the firewood and burying my bag of money behind it and –
'And you'd put Esther where? On the doorstep? On a deck chair?'
Chan's face had flushed grey. He was hollowed-out, desperate and guilty. 'I'd placed her in the middle of the road. I'd- I'd – I'd taken a sack of stupid money, but I'd left her.'
'He dumped me,' Esther said, letting go of Chan, pissed off at the memory. 'Not dumped-dumped,' she added quickly, 'We're still together – so back off.'
'Dumped like garbage,' Chan sniffed, then puffed out a big exhausted lungful of stinky hunger-breath. 'She was trying to crawl home – on asphalt. You, you should've seen her fingernails.'
Silence. Some starlings settled on a bird bath across the road. Supper, I thought. Three birdlings for me, two each for Chan and Esther, with nice hunks of roast pumpkin cooked in ortolan fat.
'I left her there. I left her in the road, leaving this trail of, like, potato stamps of blood from her knees. Esther's money, she didn't think I knew, but I knew. It's all I think about when I see people. I think of where they've stashed their mil. And I've got almost everybody figured out. See Esther? She would wheel inside a house every day and just park herself in front of a big screen TV. And she would watch with her imagination. And no one else had the patience, the imagination to sit with her. Her million– she left it on the floor, man, plain as day, plus the two hundred kay from selling the medical kit to King Adam. St Joseph Street, number 19. Just there in a mound on the rug, like as if she was saying anybody was welcome to the money, anybody could come in so long as they would sit with her and spend a little time in Imaginationland.'
'You got her chair back, though.'
Chan looked straight up at heaven and roared, 'I ran two hours. One hour to find a mechalovin' WHEELBARROW to transport my money in, in a shed full of weed whackers and those traps that eat your leg, and chainsaws. 30 minutes to return to Adam's compound. Ten minutes to beg him to get out of the chair and sell it back to me, that prick smirking the whole time, using his bigass words, toying with me like I's a yoyo or something.'
I punched my hand. 'That fat fuck would've asked for – how much? Eight hundred thousand? Nine?'
'Two point six five,' Esther said.
'MILLION.'
Esther swallowed with a dry throat. 'ALL of it. Bankrupt. Everything.'
'But you can't have nothing – else you may as well, just walk out of here, right? Game over, right?'
'Oh Ede,' Esther said. 'Didn't your old man tell you when he was setting this all up? There's only one way out.'
Chan flexed his shoulder blades and got ready to push a car. 'Ask Fatima.'