129 Days
To Go
They pushed me out of the Jeep at dawn. I stumbled and my baby writhed inside me. She hated how rough they were with mama. I squinted in the new sunlight. I needed to eat and vomit at the same time. My thighs were wet with piss. We were in the northeast corner of Moneyland, facing a river.
'He is call it Island of Exile,' Anya announced. 'King Adam, he have set aside reserve for you people.'
'You mean there's others?'
'You are the only one of your kind.'
'I'M NORMAL. YOU'RE ALL WRONG. YOU'RE– '
Anya stuck her legs between mine, twisted her hips and judo-flipped me into the mud and reeds. I struggled to pull my fingers out of the dark green, sucking mud.'You swim or you drown.'
'You had no right to steal,' Maeve said coldly.
'You've stolen from me my whole life. You stole my, my, you copied my iDENtity. You used to fucking worship me.'
'Yah, well. I worship someone better now. Someone true.'
'The king told us what you did,' Eli said, shaking his head, folding his arms, disgusted. 'How you denied him a crust of bread at DeliDiscount. For what? To stop a man eating a tired old lettuce. You would have had our provider locked up for feeding his family. You sinned. Lucky for you, you get to atone. That's all there is to it.'
'Y'know, Eden, in English, Mrs Vaoga taught that William Faulkner said the past is another country. D'you remember that? I'll bet you don't, do you. Probably off at a prom committee meeting, huh. Or student council. Well this IS another country, Ede, and my past is OUT THERE, not in here.' Maeve reached inside her plastic bag and pulled out a bottle. I began to cry, desperate for a drink.
'Please,' I said, 'I'm so thirsty. D'you – d'you have anything to eat? Like just the crumbs at the bottom of your chip packet?'
Maeve threw the bottle. It was glass and it hit my collar bone hard. I slid back and my toes entered the water. Eli reached into Maeve's bag, tossed another glass bottle up and down in his hand, and threw it at my face. My skull took the impact. It felt like someone had smacked me with a stone. I slipped back into the water, pushed breath out of my lungs and let myself sink until I couldn't kneel. Anya was the next to lob something at me, lifting a stick out of the mud and hefting it toward me. I ducked into the brown bath and watched the surface explode in white bubbles as the stick-bomb landed where my head had been. My baby – a stomachful of air, fluids, juice, bubbles – my baby tried to force my body to the surface. I urged my body down, held my breath, didn't move. The cold river probed my scalp, rummaged down the back of my shirt. I surfaced just in time to see Maeve pulling out a glass bottle, Anya lifting a boulder over her head and Eli launching a tyre toward me. It landed with a massive splash. If it had hit, it would have knocked me unconscious. I ducked under again, turned and swam through dark green clouds, leaving a crater of white water.
I pulled my cumbersome body through the river, surfaced five metres onwards. I didn't turn to check what they were throwing at me, but I heard the splashes. I swam another five metres, surfaced, gulped air. I dived down again, surfaced, and checked behind me this time. The people attacking me had shrunk. They were still throwing things, but I had to be 15 metres away now. My baby hammered on the wall of her womb. I ducked and swam seven metres this time, through the soup. There were reeds on the bottom, reaching up like hands. There were ducks who flapped away, squawking as if to tell their friends that an outcast was coming, an exile. A failure of my species.
My feet scraped stones, disturbed a plume of silt. I walked on all fours, my hands taking some of the weight of my belly. I lurched onto the sandy shore of my island, pricking the soles of my feet on rocks, slipping in the silt. I crawled into the grass, turned, peered through the bulrushes, checked for danger.
Maeve was blowing me a kiss and laughing. The militia trudged out of the mud back up to the road, got into their Jeep and drove away.
*
The island was a brown field with a skirt of bulrushes. It looked like it had been farmed. It took 10 minutes to walk its perimeter. My world was now the size of three soccer fields. This was my private republic.
I scanned for food and found onions growing in the soil. That was pretty much it. There were lots of bushes plus shrubs sprouting out of old stumps, and there were exactly 14 trees, all oaks, quite old and warped with faces in the gnarled bark. I thought about the people who'd planted them. I guessed the age of the oaks to be 40 years, maybe 50. That put the planters back around 1995. The age of disco balls, black and white movies, flagpole sitting, I seem to remember from Mr Mo's history class. Synthesizers. Tracksuits. Those people back then could never have imagined large houses would take over their fields, large houses with expansive gardens, then those homeowners must have decided their farms weren't enough and invited developers to buy them out and to subdivide, parcel up everything with fences and cul de sacs, make the hedges all the same, sow suicide seed. Flush the animals out of the countryside. Turn the river murky with – what was that stuff Watson taught me about after our dinner of koi that night? Phosphorus, yeah. Awesome fertiliser for the soil. Terrible pollutant for the river.
I wanted to do another loop of my island but it felt important to conserve energy. I wanted to hug my knees and wait to dry out. My enemies had disappeared from the riverbank, but I had an idea that if I swam back across, I would get far worse punishment than being nudged into a river. Adam's gang were convinced what they were doing was fair. They thought they were doing good. That was the scary part.
I sat on a tree trunk, stroking the wood. Good spot for a fashion shoot, I thought, and laughed out loud. I realised I was close to the edge of the biodome. I walked through the middle of my island and on the extreme northeastern side I was facing the rim of the biodome across another skin of green river. There was a rippling sort of horizon, as if the earth was giving off heatwaves. The humming was like an electric fence. I picked up a stone and biffed it toward the edge. The stone slowed, started falling toward earth then dribbled down the horizon like bird poop. My nose got a whiff of melted car tyres. If it could melt a rock, imagine what it could do to my flesh. No wonder it had stung Fatti so bad. Just thinking of the sudden end to Fatti's life made me want to scream with rage. I enjoyed a quick fantasy of grabbing Adam's hair and ramming his face into the wall, melting his nose and lips off. He could walk around the rest of his life looking like a Picasso.
Adam Turing. I wanted to spend a couple of days finding food before I sat down and worked out a plan for that guy, my own interpretation of justice. My plan would involve tearing out his eyeballs and feeding them to eels so he could watch his own misery. Or maybe I'd pull a couple of planks of wood off the barn, nail them into a tee shape and crucify him, leave him out here under the sun to die of thirst. Only fair for a guy who thought he was the Second Coming of Christ.
No. No. My plan was to give birth to my baby, initially. I could slaughter that slimy leech afterward, but my baby would come first. God she was close, now. I'd be giving birth on this stupid island, undoubtedly. Maybe my ex-friends would push across the water a raft full of supplies. Maybe I'd starve, too.
My options now were to feed myself or scrape out a nest to sleep in. I crouched, struggled to balance my weight as I squatted then gave up on squatting. I was too bloated. I kneeled instead – aah – and used a stick to scrape dirt away. 10 scrapes removed two inches of dirt. 20 scrapes only got three inches below the surface. My hole widened extremely slowly. It wasn't even a hole, just a wide depression. 40 scrapes made the hole four inches deep. I got up, snapped my stick over my knee. My baby complained.
Stop, listen, smell, Omar had told me once when we were hauling in our eel traps. See, feel, taste. Your senses will provide for you, if you quiet your brain. What can you see? What will you eat today?
I crouched in the middle of the field. Most of the dirt was covered in dandelions and grass, but the runnels and furrows were still obvious. No one had done anything to this island since – since? It had hosted tractors once, and there was a pile of corrugated iron and wooden beams and licheny timber which had once been the barn. I couldn't see any sign of cows. There wasn't any road connecting here, just a tiny jetty sticking into the water on the island's north side, pointing towards the biodome's wall. Freedom lay through that wall, I tried to tell myself. That was a load of garbage. Even if I did bust a hole in the wall and forfeit the rest of my money, I would have the university campus to get through. They wall off campuses, these days, so paups don't come in and mooch off the light and heat and drinking fountains.
I hoped the last farmer here had planted capsicums, mushrooms and onions for pizzas. I looked around for signs of anything edible. I was right about the onions, at least – the crop must have come up by itself 10 weeks ago. Most of the onions were rotten, though I found one which seemed promising. I battled through the skin for a minute, using my teeth to help unpeel it, and bit into the flesh, chewing and looking around.
I spat it out, threw it towards the biodome wall and approached the collapsed barn.
'You'd better be in here,' I threatened the barn. My baby stirred.
I seized the corner of a sheet of roofing iron, lifted it, reached down and was just about to grab a handful of wriggly lizards when a spider moved a few inches.
I screeched and let go of the iron, which clattered loud enough for anyone to hear it on the far side of the water.
'Shivers,' I said. It was strange to hear my voice. 'Man I hate spiders.' I lifted the iron again, stared at the crouching cluster of legs. The spider was as wide as a postage stamp and coloured like a peach. Behind it was evidence of its gluttony – one mummified gecko and several moths sealed in web.
Being afraid of spiders was pointless, and I was insanely hungry. My baby protested, I was overcome with hunger, and I seized the spider, swallowed it, ran to the edge of the river and washed it down with palmfuls of water. Four kilojoules. All protein. I was sure I could feel it wriggling and tickling with its thousand black hairy legs.
'YERRRRK!' My scream dissolved in the air. No one answered. No one felt bad for me.
Still, I looked for more bugs and lizards, scraping dirt with my fingertips, lifting every stone. My fingers found something hard and promising, sound kind of lid, that had to have some gooey peanuty cockroaches under it, but it was just a manhole cover. Too hard to get open. Easier to lift stones and wood instead. I turned over every log in a ten metre line, peeking under stones, too. There was a skink which wriggled away, leaving me only its tail to eat (one calorie), ten crickets, several beetles. Things would be hand to mouth, here. I was going insane and it felt okay. I kept my fingers around the population of clicking, pulsing little critters, trying to decide whether to eat them one by one or scoff the whole mass. I asked my baby what to do. She suggested I crush them into something resembling a candy bar. I squeezed the bugs and was about to eat them, when I remembered something Omar said once about the food chain. You wanna catch a buffalo, put hay on your hook. Weird-ass expression, yeah, but the dude was talking about fishing.
There was a jetty dissolving into the water, its beams and planks once painted white now snapped like toothpicks, soft and crumbling, and several ducks were hanging out there, heads squashed into their backs, doing nothing. I didn't have a fishing line, but I found a good long hard stick to use as a rod. I took off the thin silver necklace Mumshine had given me for my eleventh birthday, promised my Mumshine I'd replace it somehow. I tied it on the end of a stick, scraped the metal charm on a stone then bent it til it was vaguely hook-like. My necklace was the only piece of metal on the whole island. Thanks, Mumshine.
I let go of a fistful of bugs into the bottom of my t-shirt. When I'd sharpened my charm into a decent-enough hook, I threaded my necklace through the end, double-tied a knot, jammed the other end of the necklace through a tight spot on my fishing stick and tied it off. I sat on an exposed bit of wood, careful not to sit on the sharp bolts sticking out. I lowered the rod into the water, jerked the rod around a few times. I scattered my bugs. They floundered and slowly sank.
I couldn't see any koi or eels but the ducks came immediately, one boy-duck, one girl. I decided to even things up and catch the male. I wanted to see a boy die today. 'Here, ducky,' I cooed. The mallard was worth hundreds of calories.
'Heeeeere, ducky ducky ducky.' The mallard stuck his head underwater and looked for some of the bugs. The mallard's wife appeared, and a fleet of ducklings, looking like bumblebees spinning and flapping, stuck to the water.
I wouldn't take the mummy away from her babies, or the babies from their mum. I pulled my rod in, rolled off the wood, jogged to the edge of my field. A tree, lying on its side, soft with rain, preyed-on by fungus, offered treasure underneath. It had to weigh 200 kilos, but I was hungry and angry and I would trade passing pain for a satisfied stomach and a little extra strength. I barged the tree, urged it off the ground a couple of inches, reached down, grunting, and wedged the tree with a stone.
'Hold, you son of a bitch,' I growled, foam gathering at the corners of my mouth. Under the rotten wood was an earthworm as fat as my little finger and as long as a book. 'Yuss! C'mere, ya little bastard.' I seized the worm, hooked it in the middle and tied its head and tail together around the hook.
I stopped just before the water, pulled the hooked worm to my lips, and gave it a good luck kiss. Then I sat, lowered the rod and jiggled it a bit. The male duck came near, pretended he was more interested in some bulrushes, splashed away.
'Come back, come back you – hoooleeeeee moly.'
A pair of huge black animals appeared on the water, loaded with meat, drifting towards me. Turke- black geese? – no – swans! Big hunks of feathered meat gliding so gently across the water that I didn't see their feet move at all. Their eyes seemed dumb and unreflective, uninterested. Hunched necks, covered in muscle. Covered in meat that would soon be popping as its grease roasted over an island fire.
'I'm coming for you,' I growled at my meal.
When the mallard extended his neck, tried to grab just the end of my worm, I moved the rod a little closer and the duck clamped his beak on the hook. I yanked the rod up and caught the duck's tongue – there was no mistaking it. The mallard thrashed and I pulled hard, then saw a drop of blood fall from the duck's mouth. If I pulled too hard, I would get a tongue and maybe a bloody pink palate, but no duck.
I stood and walked backward slowly, gently, pulling my meal out of the water as he rained soft feathers across the water's surface, watched by frightened swans who moved a few metres back. The mallard's wings were beating faster than I'd thought ducks were capable of, beating like a hummingbird. The female rounded up her bumblebee ducklings and retreated toward the far shore.
The mallard was forced to walk ashore. It jerked right and tried to climb a tree. Then the duck headed left and I moved in, making circles with the end of the rod until those circles had coiled around the mallard's neck. I didn't want that thing to bite me. I stood on the duck's back, lifted the rod and pulled so hard I felt its neck snap, the sick guilty vibrations moving up my arm. I felt more hungry than guilty, though, so I went to work, tugging the rod as hard as I could, tearing the head off at the top of the neck.
The wings were still moving by themselves, rising a couple of inches, shuddering, then coming back to the duck's body to get ready for another flap. I stomped on its body and a purple hint of intestine spurted out the duck's rear. I wrapped the intestine around my fingers and pulled the intestine out, three metres of orange and purple rope, plus other organs I didn't have a name for. I dragged Mr Mallard by his intestine down to the water. The swans had nearly moved on completely, but they were hovering. They wanted to get fed. I had to coax them back with tiny scraps of meat, slippery and bloody, which I got by reaching inside the explosion-hole in the rear of the duck. After I'd tossed a dozen bits of raw duck guts into the water the swans, in a pair, paddled over. They dipped their heads, sniffed the bits of flesh but didn't eat. I saw an eel emerge, too, nosing curiously through the water. I would come for him later.
Inserting both hands into the duck's hole I pulled in opposing directions until the duck split in two, finally coming apart at some sort of wishbone at the base of its neck. A litre of green grass clippings poured out of the duck. It stank like compost with human poo in it and I retched. I swept the muck into the water, stood on the duck's neck and tore the duck into fragments. I tossed into the water legs, wings, feet, liver, ribs, then leaned off the edge, my belly agonised, and washed my fingers. The swans were so curious now they seemed to be dipping their beaks in the bloody water. The closest swan came two feet away from my hands, realised I was a threat, then moved away.
'Get back here. You're mine.'
I rolled away from the water, ran to select an oak branch as thick as a baseball bat. The club had a hard little spike sticking out of the end, perfect for cracking skulls.
I waded into the water and managed to spot two remaining pieces of duck flesh. I tossed these at the swans. They approached in a pair, turned and went away, came near again. I waited for a time when the swans were looking away but they never took their black eyes off me. Finally I put a tiny grape-shaped purple lump on my club and held the club out. It was the mallard's heart.
'Delicious,' I told the swan, trying not to giggle, drunk on hunger, delirious with hope, 'Come and get it. Come and get THIS.'
The swan neared, dipped its head one way, prepared to gobble its morsel. I smashed its head with my club. It swooned, its friend approached and reared up, spreading massive wings, pushing gusts of air at me. I bashed the swan's head to one side, returned to the first swan and tripped in the mud as I swung, delivering a half-strength blow. The first swan I'd struck must have had its wing-circuits wired into its brain, because its wings were twitching like a malfunctioning robot, failing to lift it up and away from safety. Its head bobbled uselessly underwater. I could see bubbles coming up from its nostrils. The second swan knocked the club from my hands and bocked me right on the cheek and started jabbing my stomach. It took me a moment to become insulted. You do NOT mess with Eden Shepherd's stomach. I grabbed the duck's neck, wound the neck around my arm until the head was tucked in my armpit. I fell backward, rammed its head into the underwater mud, pinched its throat until I felt something crush, snapped its wings, put my fingers in its eyes and popped its brain.
I dragged my dinner back onto dry land. It would be my lunch too. Four meals, maybe. Ten meals, who knew. I just had to kill. I'd changed, given up all hope, all reason to be reserved. Go with your instincts, girl.
My legs were painted with swirls of mud. My baby complained. I wanted to lie there and weep over the ugly violence, the crushed throat, the bubbles coming out of a drowning head with eyes looking at me in panic. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I got to work. I trudged through the field to the collapsed barn. There were rectangles of roofing iron with orange edges where the iron was rusted. I snapped off two triangles of sharp iron. These would be my knives.
I found one of my swans had squirmed and flopped down the riverbank and re-entered the water, zombified. Its head floated on the surface like a dead fish. Just one of its feet was kicking. I pulled it out. Back on land, I groped its wings until I was through the feathers and touching meat with hard bone beneath it. There was maybe 500 calories of meat on each wing. I stood on its back, knotted its head around my wrist, looked up at the judgemental spirits I could feel watching me, apologised, strained as hard as I could and pulled the swan's head off its neck. I threw the head in the water for the eels.
'Same goes for you, if you don't comply,' I said to the other swan. I laughed at my own joke. The darkening sky told me the mechs were turning the lights out. Soon it would be time to sleep in the bough of a tree, under some old iron, or maybe a hole in the ground. Time to switch hope off, give up, become – what was that nerd-word Watson taught me – become bestial.