My fire was easy, and it was fun, and every feather I tore from every inch of every swan's body made me think: I don't need Omar. I don't need my parents. I definitely don't need King Adam's pity.
My fire was started with a pile of kindling arranged in a small hole I'd scraped out of a dry part of the beach. There was lots of dry, dead grass to mash into the kindling. I scraped and kicked and stomped the earth all along the edge of the river til I had a collection of likely-looking stones. The pumice and the granite didn't spark. A hunk of sandstone disintegrated as I smashed it with a good big riverstone. I tried to position this shiny, flinty-looking stone while I bashed it with some white rock which had little bits of crystal in it. I crushed my finger and it throbbed. I sucked it and tasted swan blood and felt like vomiting. I got up and went for an angry walk and screamed and a flock of blackbirds scattered. I snapped pieces of thin, dry timber over my knee. I found a pane of glass and a big steel bolt and positioned my reflection in the glass and smashed it. I took a blade of glass back to my pathetic, useless tinder-filled ditch. I would concentrate the rays of the fake sun – if I could just catch them. The light wasn't strong enough. It was nothing like sunlight. I couldn't turn the light into a laser. I would have given anything for a YouTube tutorial. FUCK.
I tossed the steel bolt in my hand, once. It was as thick as a golf ball. I slammed it onto the ground as hard as I could.
It smacked against the flint.
An orange spark skipped into the air.
I blurted a little laugh. I kneeled, took the flint in one hand and the bolt in the other and struck them together.
Another spark. Iron and flint? Holy shit!
I struck and prayed and chimed and clashed the stone and steel and breathed a perfect stream of air onto the tinder. A wisp of smoke rose up, and vanished. I sparked again, and again, and the smoke taunted me, danced –
Then there was fire, and I was shrieking and clapping and breakdancing in the dirt.
I piled a mound of sticks and grass so high I could hardly even get close to the fire.
I rammed skewers all the way through my naked, pink plucked swans, from beak to butthole, and cooked them in the hot smoky zone on top of a twilight fire, which I sat in front of for an hour, warming myself, trying to make the bullies across the water jealous. My first swan had burned skin and raw guts and I puked at the taste.
I watched the second one patiently, turning it constantly, and parts of it cooked nicely. Tender fragments of meat fell off the ribs and I sucked them and groaned with contentment.
Lying back on the riverbank, watching the fire, drunk on roast meat, I got a glimpse, briefly, of a figure hopping out of its Jeep and standing on the riverbank devouring a Slim Jim. I thought I saw drool running down her chin as she chewed the salty meat, leathery and flat as roadkill, mashing the dry woody texture with her teeth. I thought I saw my firelight glint on her spitty chin. I thought it was Maeve. I sent her a psychic text message. You're lucky you're my veep. Lucky we used to practice pashing after midnight when you slept over, after we upended my bed and built that fort together and told ghost stories.
Last chance, Maeve Simpson. Say you're sorry.
Then she was gone.
As the fire collapsed into glowing charcoal and I let exhaustion win, I scraped soil out of the ground, enough to fit my body in. It would be vile, ugly, primitive, maybe cold, but there was nothing else here except the humps of the winnowed field soil. My blanket would be sticks and grass and wood. I lay in my grave-shaped hole and pulled an uncooked, fluffy swan wing over me. I played with the wing like an accordion, opening and closing it, and felt filthy with guilt. I thought about luring another swan and wringing its neck and using the warm chest as a pillow, but flies would come and the flesh would go cold and hard and its black marble eyes would probably stare accusingly at me in the dark. Plus dead things go really hard and lumpy. I supposed I could let my head lie on the duck's body as rigor mortis set in and the flesh hardened like one of those pillows that moulds around your head, but eew.
'Man I'm gross,' I said aloud, alone in my hole full of grass and feathers, staring at the night sky. 'I'm the gross with the most. Man I want toast, toast with roast and a goose and a moose. La la la.' No farmer emerged from the barn, no owl copied me. 'CAN ANYONE HEARRRRR ME? HELLOOOOO? SCREW EVERYONE. SCREW ALL OF YOU.'
You-you youuuuu. My echo travelled over the water, took flight, hit the ceiling somewhere.
I pressed my belly button. My organiser took a couple of seconds to activate. The swan had put hundreds of calories into me, but my body was obviously suffering. The river water I'd been gulping had probably poisoned me. God, which part of my diet was unbalanced? I'd certainly suffered enough dandelion salads, I thought that would have put the right vitamins in me. I realised that strangely, I'd hardly taken in any oil or salt and very little sugar – ingredients I used to eat in every Happy Meal. I chuckled at the irony: I was probably doing well in terms of the food pyramid.
The pyramid! I could see it from here. With the sun going down in the west behind it, the pyramid was a stark black … what was the word Watson had used… ziggurat. Unnatural. Ugly. Monstrous. But I couldn't stop staring at it.
As the mechs dimmed the evening sky orange to purple I switched on my organiser. It was glowing okay, meaning my body was producing just enough electricity to make the photos viewable. I'd snapped shots over the past year from Community Day, that cancer fundraiser thing where Fatti shaved her head, and from the school paralympics where we all rallied behind Esther. I'd forgotten how big a part of my life Maeve used to be. That two-faced social climber was in every second shot, just about. Most of my pics had cool kids in them, but then there was a picture of Adam on the ground with Kane standing over and laughing at him. I deleted the photo, pulled a stick and some grass over my head and hunkered low. Then I opened my Trash folder, restored the photo. Deleting it didn't take away the memory of how dumb we'd treated Adam.
There had been a day, it had to have been November, holidays coming up, a day when we didn't have exams, just the prom, and all anyone wanted to do was make sure they had their date and their limo sorted out. Kane and Omar and Eli had held down the geography teacher, Mr Leslie, and cut his loveheart-patterened necktie off with scissors and chopped it into confetti and they'd sprinkled it around the room, and a bunch of us girls did something crazy, too, duct-taping the principal to her chair and spinning her around and wheeling her out into the middle of the plaza for everyone to sign her face with a Sharpie. Craziness, joy, excitement, mirth. Kids kicking balls, spraying whipped cream on everyone, pashing in the hallways. I'd captured all the craziness with photography. I didn't realise what I'd captured, though, until now.
Here was a photo probably taken by KT. It showed me in the changing rooms at Carlisha's Cuts. We were bordered by head-to-toe mirrors. I was holding a dress against me with a mock-Flintstones style pattern – pebbles around the neck, orange fabric with delicate embroidery. Maeve was holding an identical dress against her body, one size larger to fit over Maeve's hips and fat boobs.
There was a photo of the girls holding me up after I'd scored a goal in soccer. Maeve was directly under me.
Photos of me presenting the school yearbook design options to my committee; Maeve captured on camera clearing chairs out of the way to allow space for the hologram. Maeve copying everything I drank, everywhere my body went, my gestures, my haircut, my facial expressions. Photos showing Eli standing in authoritative positions within crowds. Photos showing Fatima splitting donated cans of sweetcorn and boxes of Weetbix into portions for pauper families. Photos of Omar doing crazy parkour moves across the school roof. A photo with Kane holding a sign saying World's Biggest Mechalover over Watson's head while he quietly read a book in the shade of a tree.
Here was a photo of Kane with his foot on the back of Adam's neck, forcing Adam's face in a bowl of dog food. Here was a photo of Adam cleaning up a tray of milkshakes I'd dropped in the lunch room one time. Adam holding a door open for me. Adam with a dog leash around his neck, Kane taking the joke one step further. Adam's white school shirts were always dark, unclean, sometimes torn, never fitted, always stretched.
The photos – God, 300 of them– showed Chan pushing Esther onto the stage at assembly, showed the two of them practising for Dancing With The School Stars. Chan and Esther cutting up a watermelon together. I'd been too obsessed at the time with trying to make Chan like me. I guess I should've respected him and Esther. It was just hard accepting that a person in a wheelchair could be better than me.
300 photos, off-cuts I hadn't meant to keep, and a test video of snow falling on a mountain monastery that looked pretty good, its light standing out against the night shrouding everything.
Then a flare in the distant darkness. A light resting on the pyramid – a flame? Some event. A ceremony. I switched on my org and used the binoculars app until I was watching up close.
I watched five people light hologram candles on their Orgs and climb the ladder to the top of the pyramid. It was slow work; two pairs of workers, KT and Chan and Anya and Eli, took the weight of King Adam's stretcher and hauled him to the top. There was nothing to block my view of the servants working to elevate their ruler, no smog, few trees in the way. They got King Adam to the top, positioned him on the glass tabletop we'd put up there to stand on. I watched the king switch his organiser on. His org had real power behind it. He must have been stuffing his face with thousands of calories each day to get that kind of a glow from his body.
The sky was the thick bluey-black of deep night now. A dog howled, splitting the silence. I think the dog might've even been atop the pyramid with King Adam.
Two kilometres away, my binocular screen showed Adam using his telescope app. The air cleared in front of him, as if a pane of glass floated before him, a lens, and he looked directly at me.
'Jesus!'
I quickly switched my org off, pulled my sticks and grass over me, pressed a forearm against my ear, drew my knees up under my chin, shivered. He would stare all night. I had no way to fight his gaze. I would have to sleep through it. I would have to sleep through the dog's howls. Somewhere, something dangerous was in pain, or agitated, harassed, tethered. Angry. Adam was probably whipping Anya somewhere out there. Maybe he was cutting the palms of his devotees, squeezing blood into a grail, doing rituals up there.
I hit the Exit button and was about to switch off my org when a (1 new) message in my emails snagged my brain. The message was almost eight months old. It must've been the last thing to plop into my inbox before we entered this place and the wifi got shut off.
'This had better be good.'
Email from my mum. The details said it had landed in my inbox around the time I'd stepped into the tunnel which dropped me into Mahonyland, holy heck, what, 236 days ago? The day I'd made her miserable. Shouted at her. Dissed her face. Back when I used to never say thanks for anything.
Aloha, babygirl, the message began. My eyes immediately started to sting. My famished body made my tongue lick the tears off my top lip. Mumshine's voice. Her cuddles. All those times she brushed my hair to help me get ready for school quicker.
Just want you to know wherever you are, whatever's going on, I am thinking of you. Please understand I left Camp Kampf because I wanted to make life instead of ending it. We were so uncompromising with the Quislings, the scientists, the programmers, the engineers. Then I met your father when I was shoving a bomb in the guts of his laboratory and I realised I was put on earth to make life, not to end it.
Remember, babygirl, everything you do matters. The rain that refreshes the parched ground is made up of single drops. Kate Sheppard said that – and she got girls around the world the power to vote. The original 01XX Amazon.
Xoxo, Mumshine
ps – Say hi to your buddies for me btw! Who's mayor? Bet it's my girl. I'd vote for you, baby.
I sniffed salty droplets back inside my head, stroked my hard, round tummy. 'Mummy,' I moaned in my black cold pit. 'I stuffed up baaaaad.'
She'd attached a photo I had never seen. It showed her standing beside a swimming pool with one of those robot lifeguards beside her, the slender pale ones with the intense grey eyes that look like Watson. Mum was holding a tiny baby, squeezed between her boobs. The photo was blurry because it had been snapped mid-action. Mumshine was smiling too enthusiastically for the camera. Joy was radiating out of her. I was SO tiny, like a couple of months old, swaddled in white cloth with a beanie covering my head. My ears looked like button mushrooms. One of my pink hands was free of the cloth and it was gripping Mumshine so tightly my fingers were like koala claws.
18 years ago she'd paused her revolution so she could give up her whole body to feed me. I'd never given back anything except store-bought cards I picked up every Mother's Day and hastily scribbled exes and ohs on. All I could do, now, was pay forward mum's support to the next baby girl.
My eyes were so wet I couldn't see my belly button to turn the screen off. Guilty words were knocking against my skull, tonk-tonk-tonk. I wiped my eyes on my knees. I cuddled feathers and grass and felt my body sinking through the earth. The hole was pretty much a shallow grave, and it had a hard edge where a concrete pipe with a metal top stuck out of the dirt. Just another manhole to nowhere. Something was knocking, tonk-tonk. Tonk-tonk-tonk, some message. My exhausted body melted into the dirt. I imagined the tight walls of the pit, warmed by my body, were Mumshine's shoulders and boobs and arms cradling me. I took a twig and scratched 01XX into the flesh of my arm. The scratch was white on pink. I crossed out the 01 and underlined the XX. Synth=Death, Woman=Strong.
I slept deeply.