It was a random morning tea break on a random day when Omar told us good luck, See ya, washed his raisins down with the last of his iced coffee, hopped from the top of the fort onto the ladder, stroked the cars one last time.
'WAIT, OMAR, WAIT! Aren't you comfortable with us? What the fuck?'
He shook his head. 'Comfortable's what got you trapped in here. Comfortable's not safe.'
After Omar said Laters and scampered away, I kept scanning Moneyland for him through my binocs. He slept in trees. He hunted in fields one day, then the river the next, then he hunted in the basements of abandoned mansions. He never stayed still.
'I doubt Omar would want you slavering over his scent,' Watson said when he saw me scanning the horizon for him through my binocs. 'I suspect he's trying to teach you something about independence.'
I switched the app off. 'I wish he would've stuck around.'
'It's not exactly safe here,' Watson said. 'People who don't side with King Adam have rather a short life expectancy, if you know what I mean.'
I returned to work, reminded myself to stop being hopeful and reliant and grateful. We were onto the second level of the so-called monument now. Just one more level to go. I'd made over $150,000 building this fort. I'd spend it on food when I got out. Food and only food. Burgers, buffalo wings, piles of ribs, ice cream sundaes with sprinkles, thickshakes, crispy golden hash browns.
Four side by side scaffolding doors secured with stakes rammed into the side of our dirtmound gave us a ramp which could also be used as a slipway.
We built the second level mostly with furniture, dragged across Moneyland from as far away as Montreal Street. Furniture was only found in about one in every six houses in Moneyland. Each house was more likely to be a shell than not.
The pyramid would end up looking like it was built from a stack of sugarcubes, and that necessitated using precisely-stacked, square-ish furniture, especially desks, which often had drawers and leg-holes you could pack with mud. Good hard blocks, those things. Giant Jenga.
We tied the furniture together with whatever rope we could find – the wiry cord from net curtains, bungee cords, extension cords, fishing line, ethernet cable. We stacked bookcases, office desks, Ottomans, coffee tables, dining tables, storage boxes, dressers, armoirs, pedestals, duchesses, sideboards, dressers and tallboys. Nothing was better than metal filing cabinets. They were solid, they were empty, and they provided lots of hand-holds while he lugged them up the ramp, trying to ignore Anya's gang watching us and sucking ice blocks as we sweated and cursed and shook our sweaty fringes out of our eyes, listening to our tummies cry for food, trying to pretend we weren't ravenous to devour what had been promised for brunch that day. When the furniture had been packed tightly, Chan and I began wheelbarrowing up the dirt, which was being quarried full time by Watson with whatever help Esther could give. Where Omar was was a mystery. Spearing puppies and stealing their dog biscuits, we supposed. Creeping through the sewers, pushing up a periscope, maybe. Eavesdropping on everyone.
The Cruel Ones moved around in the Jeep, too lazy and important to descend from their carriage. They tossed us treats when we pleased them. Once, I was sure I spotted Adam's dog's snout sticking out the window, drizzling drool.
Over eight days we pulled mud out of a swimming pool-sized hole in the reserve, chipping away with cooking pots because we still had no spade. We quarried square, uniformly sized bricks of grass and roots and clay-ish mud from the riverbank then buried Level Two in earth, standing on mud-coated cars, packing the earth hard before smearing clay over everything. Clay could bake as hard as porcelain if exposed to sunlight and oxygen, Watson told us. Clay is full of iron and that's what makes it so heavy. Each of us could only haul up 15, maybe 20 kilos of the stuff at a time, enough to slather over the half a square metre of filing cabinet or tabletop. Watson enjoyed the progress we were making so much that I got it into my head he was corrupt, for a while, some kind of spy, but I saw Anya pay him at the same time as us. I couldn't pretend he didn't get shouted at like the rest of us. Getting ten grand a day like the rest of our crew, he would be worth $1.2m if he worked for twenty days, $1.3m for thirty days. Would the pyramid take 40 days? Longer? We were three weeks in and I tried to keep my mind on the money, not that things added up. I thought about where Adam was getting our salaries from. Eli and the girls had presumably given him everything in exchange for food and shelter and protection. Plus they had probably raided Fatima's stash. Any one of us would have.
We coated the second level in dripping rectangles of clay and it went hard pretty quickly, or maybe the days just passed so predictably that we were fooled into thinking we didn't work through agony every day. Then we were on the final level of the pyramid and we worked so steadily that it seemed to complete itself. I couldn't say it was easy – it's just that it was a smaller level and we were good at it. Everything we hauled up here, six and a half metres above the ground, was lighter than what was beneath. Our pyramid had almost entirely swallowed the fort. We had become used to holding 25 kilos over our heads, used to rivers of sweat trickling down our spines, used to the clay in our shoes, the raccoon-rings of dirt around our eyes, the taste of dust, the twisted ankles when we walked on "flat" levels of the pyramid and encountered potholes that we blamed on one another, holes where our legs pushed through and dangled.
We wanted the money badly, but it was the pineapple juice we worked for, the chocolate-covered raisins, the Hostess cup cakes. Even if our salaries cost Adam $40,000 a day, he was still left with a profit. Say Maeve and KT and Eli had given him three million between them, and he'd taken my mil, then there was a couple million each from Esther and Chan. The asshole was worth six mil, maybe seven. He could pay $10,000 a day to each of us four slaves for well over 100 days. This project would be complete soon and he'd still have millions to manipulate us into sweating even more for him. Building a Taj Mahal, maybe. It was impossible to bankrupt him.
On the 22nd day we reached the top. Four workers, four sides, one creation. The apex of the pyramid was supposed to be one perfect cube with a dais on it. Since the pyramid had grown up around the fort, enclosing it, overwhelming it, burying it, the summit just needed a lid, a platform on top of which Adam could do whatever – make human sacrifices, lob food at the people he hated, or maybe just watch nanobots flicker against the sunset. We embedded ladders in the side of the pyramid with another 200 kilos of clay which took us the whole day to pat down until it was smooth and ready to bake hard. Scraping all the mud and clay left a huge scar in the reserve that the river lapped at. We would never seed it with new grass, never repair the damage. That was Moneyland. Here, you smashed and stole and ravaged to make it through the day.
We were close to the end. Esther clung to my strong back because Chan – with a wispy beard, now – was too exhausted. Esther said something about smashing a bottle of champagne on it, like you do when launching a boat. I said we'd need something up here to smash it on, like a platform, a chopping block. We pictured Aztec heads rolling down and bouncing off the sides. We pictured Fatti's blue face and Kane's bulging eyes. Everyone started fighting about what the summit platform should be made of, with Esther shrieking in my ear and Chan spitting with frustration and Watson interjecting with big English words. All we knew was we had to leave the shaft in the centre of the fort allowing Adam to slide down the fire pole hole if he needed to get into the interior of the pyramid. We'd have to carve out an entrance to get at the central chamber, else anyone who fell into the interior of this thing would have to be pulled out with rope.
'There's a lectern in the Girl Scout's Hall,' Es said. 'Let's put that up there. Didn't he say he wanted an altar?'
'I don't know if a lectern's the same as an altar… .'
'You don't believe the girl scouts made human sacrifices?' Watson said, straight-faced.
I burst out laughing, hugged Watson, and Chan gave me another of those murderous stares.
'You'd never catch me hugging a mechalover,' Chan said, shaking his head.
'Watson is just the same as you and me.'
'You keep telling yourself that,' Chan said, and trudged down the side of the pyramid and pushed Esther across the reserve. 'Come on. Just need a platform to plop on the top. Almost finished.'
*
We settled on the smoky glass top of a dining table taken from a house on the western end of Mahony Road. It measured three metres by 1.8, had no handles and it felt as heavy as a car. I regretted suggesting it as soon as we tipped it on its side, sidled it out the door of the house and began moving it toward the pyramid – which we began to realise could be seen from Champs-Elysees, from the northern Riviera, from Montreal Street, from Adam's compound – from anywhere in our little world. I took the brunt of the weight at the bottom end of the glass tabletop and Chan and Watson went up the ladder a few inches at a time while I swore at them.
'Move! You're not moving your bit, nnh. Move, you two!'
For part of the ascent, I had to take the weight of the centimetre-thick glass on my head while I adjusted my grip. For once, I was glad my hair was greasy and sticky and hadn't been washed in half a year. Sweat leaked into my eyes, but I couldn't stop carrying. I decided the glass was 120 kilos or so, meaning at my end I was bearing something like 90 kilos of weight. We finally urged the glass to the top, slid the thick dusky rectangle over the shaft. Now the only way for people on the platform to get into the hole would be to smash the thick glass. Adam could carve a hole like an Eskimo ice fisher if he could find some sort of diamond cutter. Looking down into the black interior of the pyramid, like a haunted well, gave me a tingle of vertigo, but I looked at my friends and finally let myself feel good.
The pyramid was complete.
A pyramid that WE had built, was comPLETE.
Me and my friends had BUILT A GOD DAMN PYRAMID.
We summoned Anya. Cruel as she was, we were desperate to impress her.
'I know it looks like a three-layer cake of mud with ladders on top, but, guys, you have to listen to us, we've got the platform on top of it sussed, it can probably take like two people on it, maybe four if you're real skinny like we are, um, we can paint it if you want, it's, um, it's, you've gotta come look, Anya, it's– '
'The king is pleased,' Anya said. Then her face changed. She smiled. 'I am pleased.'
'You mean it?'
'You are finish contract. You are free.'
Chan and Watson and I fell into each other, hugging, then poured our bodies over Esther.
KT and Maeve hopped out of Adam's Jeep and one of them rolled something at us which I had forgotten existed. It was a replica soccer ball droid, a BB-8 from the Star Wars movie, except there was something wrong with it, it didn't make any sound and I couldn't see any LED lights and Maeve ran after it and booted it.
A soccer ball. A toy. Fun.
Chan grabbed me by the arm and pulled me onto the plain of grass.
'Watch out for the pumpkins, you guys!'
Skeleton-Chan hee-hawed like a donkey as he sprinted past. 'Quit worrying bout the flock for one day of your life, Shepherd.'
We played soccer until the sun went down, mingling without politics, without hate, just sharing joy, no one tripping over the manhole cover and hurting themselves, no injuries, no fights. KT was so excited she retrieved 1.5 litres of diet Pepsi from the Jeep, shook it up and squirted everyone with a geyser of brown bubbles. The Pepsi washed the blood off her lips. Nobody stopped their kicking and running and shouting and waving, although we all slowed down and gawked. It was the first time food had been wasted since we'd begun our fight for survival. KT didn't seem aware why we were staring at her until she realised the bottle in her hands was empty. 'Sorry,' she began. One of the ENEMY was apologising to US.
Esther broke the silence, struggling over the bumpy grass. Her biceps had become so thick that her forearms looked like Omar's shins.
'It's okay, KT. Just don't do it again. Come play. C'mon.'
She did play, and Maeve played, sweating until her soot eyeliner dribbled down her cheeks, and then the most jaw-dropping shit in the whole year took place.
The goal posts were two pairs of balled-up shirts. Esther couldn't contribute much to the game, apart from getting in everyone's way. Anya saw Esther withdrawing, approached, unclipped Esther from her chair and threw her over her shoulder.
'What are you doing?!' I cried out. 'Leave her – leave… her?' My voice faded as I realised what was going on. Anya ran directly into a thicket of players, Eli and KT's shins banging against Chan's and Watson's. Anya prepared her foot then got her toe under the ball and sent it through the air, metres above the heads of the other players. She barged through with Esther draped over her shoulder. Her legs ate the field in metre-long strides. When she was close to the goal, Anya unslung Esther from her shoulder, held Esther by the armpits, and said, 'Ready?'
'Ready!'
Anya's manly body painted the air until Esther's dangling, floppy legs and feet connected with the ball and sent it spinning through the air. It was a clear goal, a perfect goal, unmistakable.
Everybody in Moneyland partied deep into the night, draped over the jungle gym, spinning on the roundabout, sometimes on the slide, sometimes on the swings. There were soft drinks. There was a kilo of salted peanuts. There were dried apricots. 9pm, 10, 10.30. At 11, KT was still playing innocent pat-a-cake playground games with Esther, and they were giggling and gossiping and whispering secrets in each other's ear, smashing half a year of tension and hate and suspicion. Chan and Watson and even Eli were playing Fuck/Marry/Kill, giggling about girls. I wanted to tell them off, but they were too happy. I was too happy. We had to have dreams to pull us forward, to pull us out.
King Wormslug seemed to remain buried deep inside the back seat of the Jeep with his mutt. I didn't even see him emerge to use the toilet. I kept checking to see if he would scuttle up the side of the pyramid like a daddy long legs. I stared at the altar on top to see if he would appear there. His monument loomed over us. At over two storeys high, if you were close enough, it blocked out the moon. Tomorrow it might block out the sun.
Anya eventually drove her crew home. My equals made cabbage and cauliflower soup with heaps of laughter and sharing and helping. All of my people were in bed and snoring by midnight.
Everyone except me.
A minute after midnight, I stopped pretending to sleep. My eyes opened. I'd had something on my mind for a month now; on my mind all year, really.
I pushed the pile of bean bags off me, rolled onto my knees.
My mission began.