Aftermath, p.15
Aftermath, page 15
The name Boy-Boy stuck with me after that night, until eventually there was nothing left of my old name, just like eventually there was nothing left of the old me. Maybe it was that same night that I began to call her Mumma.
I woke earlier than normal, before the sun had risen. I held my breath, listening for the sound of Mumma’s breathing. It had become the first thing I did when I woke each morning, ever since Mumma had become infected with the amoeba — listening, making sure she was still alive. My worst fear was that I would wake one morning and find her dead, her stomach burst wide open and her guts spilled everywhere.
Gingerly, I stroked my own stomach, feeling for the first signs of swelling, but nothing had changed — still just skin and muscle beneath my bony ribs. Recently, an odd suspicion had begun taking up too much space in my head; it had occurred to me that Mumma almost looked like a pregnant woman. Today was the day that I was going to talk to her about it.
I sat up and waited for the rising sun to soften the darkness. My mouth had gone dry and I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was nervous about broaching the subject, or if I just really needed some water.
When Mumma stretched, yawned and opened her eyes, she found me staring at her and she sat up too, dragging her tee-shirt down over her rounded belly.
“What?” she asked, so I dove right in and asked her, “Mumma, do you think that maybe,” I hesitated, casting around for the right words to say, “well, maybe, could it be possible that it’s not some sort of amoeba that’s making your belly grow?”
She glared at me. “The hell you trying to say?”
“Could it be a ...” my voice dropped to a whisper and I glanced around stupidly, as if there might be eavesdroppers hiding in the cramped cave, “... could it be a Tornean baby? Might they have infected you with their spawn, somehow? I don’t know how, but you know ...” I trailed off lamely. My head filled with all sorts of scenarios, mostly lifted straight out of scary alien movies that I had watched as a kid.
“Boy-Boy, that is seriously messed up!” She looked about ready to puke and I regretted opening my big mouth. Poor Mumma, she had enough to worry about without me putting gross thoughts like that in her head.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Mate, you’d best be sorry. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. If I ever got close enough to a Tornean to make a baby, you and I both know that there’s only one of two ways that could possibly end, right? Either the Tornean dies, or I do.”
“Yeah, I know,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry. I guess I thought maybe you don’t have to be that close to a Tornean for them to ah ... make a baby. Maybe their spawn travels through drinking water, or ...”
“Or nothing.” She looked more sick than angry.
“I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.” Mumma sighed. “You know what? Why don’t you go and get lost for a bit. I can’t deal with your rubbish this early in the morning. Go do something useful and find us something to eat, eh?”
I was only too ready to get away. I hadn’t wanted to upset her, but duh, what had I expected? Poor Mumma was dealing with some horrible amoeba nightmare, and here I was throwing horrific, puke-worthy ideas at her about Tornean baby spawn colonising her guts. What an idiot.
I grabbed my backpack and my machete, and left. I wriggled through the short tunnel that led out of the stuffy cave and out into the fresh air. It was bloody freezing out there and my breath fogged up in little clouds.
After two years living here, I had a good idea of where to look for food and so I headed off towards an orchard where the gnarly old grapefruit trees still produced a semi-decent crop. We didn’t go there often — it was too far away, and too close to abandoned houses that might just possibly harbour a posse of Tornean scouts. Today though, I figured a long walk would do me good and the prospect of meeting a Tornean after so long seemed almost appealing. My guts were rolling around with a mixture of dread, anger and confusion. A Tornean to take out some of this pent-up emotion on wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
The trip to the orchard took me past an old, abandoned house. Even from a distance the garden looked a huge mess, and I suddenly felt an urge to go over and give it a good tidy up. Odd. I’d never thought of myself as the gardening type, but then again, who knew really what “type” I might have sprouted into if my whole world hadn’t been swept out from under me?
Roses spilled all over the broken-down fence, yellow roses, and it seemed like a very good idea to pick some for Mumma. A peace offering. She could put them in that vase that she loved so much. I waited at the edge of the bush, settling down to watch the house for a good ten minutes before making my move. I wasn’t about to go setting off across open land without using due caution. I didn’t have a death wish.
I’d just decided that it really was all clear, not a single Tornean in sight. I was about to step out of the trees into the open, but I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unexpected thing. An incredibly, heart-judderingly unexpected thing.
A person had flung open the front door and stepped out onto the porch. A small person — a child.
What the hell? I turned to flee, heart thudding right in the back of my mouth. I took two steps, then skidded to a halt, spun back around, crouched low behind a bush and watched the kid who was skipping down the front steps of the porch.
A kid. A human kid.
Was I scared of children now? Was that what I had become?
I dithered painfully for a moment completely at a loss for what to do. But this was the first human besides Mumma that I’d seen for so long and the need to get closer, to learn more, overwhelmed the voice in my head urging caution. My feet started moving towards the house as if of their own volition. I felt weirdly awkward, like I’d forgotten how to walk like a regular human being. I sped up and then froze again as an awful possibility hit me: this could be a trap. The Torneans could be hiding inside the house, spying on me. Maybe the kid was their decoy.
But no, that made no sense. A human kid, working with Torneans to ambush humans?
I started walking again, slowly, like wading through thick porridge but my mind was whirring. Was that kid even real? Was it a hologram or something? A Tornean mind trick. Did Torneans even do mind tricks? And then suddenly, an even more horrific thought hit me. What if that kid was a Tornean-human hybrid — what if it was the exact sort of abomination that might be growing inside Mumma’s belly?
Suddenly I vomited hot, watery bile that steamed as it splashed onto the frosty grass.
I thought about running away, getting back to the safety of the cave where Mumma could tell me how best to deal with this, but two things stopped me from doing that. 1) if I was being watched by Torneans, if this was an ambush then they would for sure and certain be coming after me and I would lead them directly to our hideout, and 2) I was sick and tired, and I mean really really sick and tired, of running and hiding.
I started walking again, then broke into a jog. The kid saw me coming. He stopped playing and his mouth dropped open, his eyes going all round like saucers, just like some cartoon character.
I raised a finger to my lips, trying to tell him to stay silent and not give me away.
The kid bellowed, “Mum! Come quick. There’s a wild man out here.”
I leapt the fence, intending to tackle him to the ground and shut him up, but instead I got caught up in the thorny tangle of rose bushes and crashed to the ground, right at the little kid’s feet.
“Mu-uum!”
Before I could scramble back up, I was surrounded by people. Like real, human people. Adults and kids.
“Oh my gosh. Look. It’s a boy.”
“What in the world?”
“He’s so filthy.”
I looked up at those shocked faces and then I started to cry. I mean really cry, like a complete baby, like I hadn’t cried since that first night with Mumma, huge, painful sobs with tears and snot running down my face and everything.
“You poor thing,” Mrs Havil said, for what was about the fifth or sixth time, her face so full of sympathy that I nearly lost it and started in on the crying again. I had showered which after two years of occasional river washes was about the closest thing to heaven that I could have imagined. Now clean and warm, dressed in clothes that weren’t rags, clothes that felt ridiculously soft, and with a bowl of the world’s most incredible tomato soup inside of me, I was sitting in the lounge, on an actual couch, with Mr and Mrs Havil and the three Havil children gawping at me.
“And all this time,” Mr Havil shook his shaggy head slowly, “you truly believed that the Torneans had won? I can scarcely believe it.”
If he could scarcely believe it then you can imagine how I was feeling at that point having just had the Havil family explain to me that in fact the invasion hadn’t wiped out the whole of civilisation and although the initial onslaught had been catastrophic with wide-spread death and destruction, the thing was, in the end the monsters hadn’t prevailed at all.
The government, as it turned out, had not been sitting on their hands like a bunch of useless twats. Following the attack that had admittedly caught them off guard they had managed to swing into action with their contingency plan, something that involved the coordinated efforts of the army and the navy and the air force. The battle had been hard fought but in a little over a year the Torneans had been completely defeated. Life in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa’s worst-hit city, had begun to return to normal, or as normal as life could be after more than half the city and its citizens had been wiped out.
And now, people like the Havil family who had abandoned their homes out here in the hills in favour of the safety of patrolled army camps, had begun returning to their land. And why not? The Torneans were gone, and the hills were safe again. Which of course, explained why I’d not seen any of the monsters for so long, but most definitely did not explain why Mumma had told me she’d seen masses of them swarming through Clevedon on her last trip, just a couple of months ago.
“My friend, Mumma,” I said, “she told me that there’s still a heap of Torneans in Clevedon. Is that true?”
“No dear,” Mrs Havil said. “That is most definitely not true. We stopped in at Clevedon to grab coffee on our way up here just yesterday and the place is looking good — they’re rebuilding very nicely, isn’t that right, Hugh?”
Mr Havil nodded.
“But why did she tell me that then?”
The Havils all looked at each other and shrugged. “Maybe you’d best ask her,” Mrs Havil suggested. Then she leant forward and placed a hand on my knee, gazing earnestly and unblinkingly into my eyes. “Dear,” she said, “would you like us to help you look for your family? Perhaps they’re alive. We can take you to the city, there’s a register for people who are looking for missing loved ones. There’s still quite a few like yourself that are unaccounted for.”
For too long I had lived without hope, certain that my family had perished, but now the possibility that they might have survived almost took my breath away. “I would like that,” I said. “I would like that more than you could possibly imagine. But,” I added, “there’s one thing that I have to take care of first.”
By the time I got back to our miserable, damp and unwelcoming cave it was mid-afternoon and Mumma was sitting perched on a rock in a patch of sunlight. The thought had occurred to me that I should have just gone off the with the Havils and never seen Mumma again. I could have left her alone to wait and worry and wonder. It was tempting, but in the end I found that I couldn’t do that.
“Hey,” she called, smiling, looking relieved. “You were gone for ages. I was getting worried.”
“Something odd happened to me,” I said and watched the frown flicker across her face.
“I met some people,” I said, all casual like, as if it were no big deal.
“Boy-Boy,” she leapt to her feet, hurried towards me and then stopped, looking uncertain, maybe a little scared.
“Why did you do that to me, Mumma? How long did you know? How long were you pretending? Why didn’t you tell me that the Torneans were gone, that things were going back to normal?”
She hung her head and tears slid down her cheeks. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? And what about your stomach?” I said. “That’s no amoeba is it? What the hell? What the hell? Why did you let me think you were dying? It’s a baby in there, isn’t it? A human baby, right?”
She just stared at me, shaking her head.
“Right?” I screamed at her. “While I was here, scared and lonely, wondering if you were still alive, if you’d been slaughtered, you were off out in the world having a great time, probably sleeping in a real bed and eating proper food, meeting people, and, and, and …” words failed me. I’d never been so angry in my life — so angry that I couldn’t even think straight.
“I was going to tell you, I promise. I just wasn’t ready. I was scared, Boy-Boy.”
“You, scared?” I sneered. “You expect me to believe that?”
“I was afraid that I’d lose you, alright? There, I’ve said it. You’re all I have. And I’m all that you have too, remember? Just you and me.”
“But that’s not true anymore,” I yelled. “The world survived. My family might have survived. How could you have not wanted me to know that they might still be alive?”
“Because then you wouldn’t have needed me anymore.”
I just stared at her, and it was then that I realised I didn’t know her at all. Mumma, the girl who had comforted me, saved my butt more than once, bossed me around, looked out for me, yelled at me and laughed with me, and in the end, betrayed me. The anger had shrivelled, and left me with only a desperate, empty sadness.
Maybe I almost understood. This world out here in the wilderness, just the two of us, it was tough and it was brutal but we had kept each other alive, and once we left here, went back and tried to pick up our old lives again, all of this would be over. And maybe I understood, just a little, why she might be too scared to try, why she wanted to hold on to what we knew rather than face the uncertainty of what might await us out there. Hell, I was scared too. Maybe my parents were alive, but maybe they weren’t and I didn’t know if I would ever feel truly ready to find out which it was. If they were gone, it was going to be like losing them all over again. But ready or not, nothing was going to stop me from trying to find them.
I sank down onto the grass. We sat in silence for a long time.
Eventually I said, “You know, Mumma, how it feels when your fingers and toes have been frozen nearly solid and then they start to warm up? You know that burning pain, once the feeling starts coming back?”
She stared at me but said nothing,
“Well,” I continued, “I reckon that’s what this is like now — not a physical pain, but you know, emotionally. When your heart has been frozen up with grief and suddenly, there’s a chance that the people you love haven’t died. There’s this hope, right? But when your heart starts to thaw out, it hurts too. It hurts because of all you’ve lost and missed out on, and all that you might still lose. It all comes at you in a big scary rush. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
“Maybe.”
“Look, Mumma, I can’t say that I forgive you. I mean really, I can’t believe that you lied to me about this, that you even let me think that you had some terrible parasite thing. But I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I kind of understand.”
“Will you stay here with me, then?” she asked.
“No. I’m going home.”
“Oh.”
“I’m really angry at you right now, like furious. I’m not gonna pretend that I’m not. But … I guess I don’t exactly hate you. I’m going home to see what’s left of my life, and if you want, you can come with me. We can face whatever we have to face out there together. You and me. What do you say?”
“I guess I don’t have much of a choice,” she sulked.
I felt like kicking her. I was trying to be gracious about this. She could at least look a little grateful.
“There’s always a choice,” I said. “But I would be glad if you decide to come with me.”
She looked broken and lost, but she managed to muster the ghost of a smile. “Okay, Boy-Boy,” she said. “We’ll go together.”
“Call me Harry,” I told her.
She nodded, “Then I guess you’d better start calling me Grace.”
Funny thing, what goes through a boy’s head. Grace pregnant with a Tornean kid? It’s just not possible. But when you’re alone and afraid, hiding in the bush, you might believe anything. Glad they’re with people now, though, because that’s what keeps us strong. Let’s go up the coast a bit, I hear that Orua’s a nice spot to visit, despite everything that’s happened.
Leaving Ōrua (The Last of the Estuary's Sun)
by Gregory Dally
It could be called piquant, the tang
left by a haystack once it’s dried.
The rain has dispersed. You breathe in.
It’s an indulgence that has you imagining tussock fire.
These vapours can only keep moving your atoms
in a quest for the ultimate condition.
You assay the tide’s fleet of shivers
around your legs and your mind. It’s soothing
to take in the coolness on light rays
turned in jade over your head. This is the start
of a journey, even though your shuffle
disturbs the outline of the current for just an instant
then masquerades as an imprint
enmeshed among ancient silicates. All memories
have vanished. That’s apropos for a traveller giving in
