Juice, p.2
Juice, page 2
He scowls. I’m still trying to get a read, looking to pick my moment to jump him.
What’s on the rig? he asks.
A maker. Growpods.
You steal ’em?
Made them.
He grunts.
You got seeds?
I nod.
Where you from?
The peninsula.
Which peninsula?
North.
How far north?
North of Capricorn.
Jesus. What about her?
No idea. I think she’s off a migrant boat. Maybe a slaver.
Those fuckers.
What about you?
What about me?
Where are you from?
Doesn’t matter anymore.
And how do you live?
He sighs.
Really, I say. I’m interested.
Microbial protein, he says.
You can make powder?
He nods.
Why don’t we consolidate?
I don’t need you.
I don’t see a vehicle, any kit.
Think I’d leave my assets in the open? Think I’m stupid?
No, mate. But I know neither of us will see home again.
Cheery bastard, aren’t ya?
So this is either an ending or an opportunity.
Maybe both, he says, hefting the crossbow a little higher.
The child presses against me.
What the fuck’re you doing with her, anyway?
Keeping her safe.
For what?
Jesus, man, to give her a life, why else? When’s the last time you saw a kid?
Are they farming them?
Brother, you’ve been out here on your own too long.
Show me she’s real. Prove it, he says, jabbing the crossbow at her.
The child whimpers and clambers against me, and then, in a scalding rush that runs down the leg of my dungarees, she puts the question beyond doubt.
Okay, he says. Let’s go.
Where?
Turn around.
Comrade, please. Don’t touch her.
I said turn the fuck around.
The kid has her legs snagged in mine. It’s no easy manoeuvre to gets us about-faced. But when I do there’s nothing ahead but the dark maw of the shaft.
He hauls the top rungs up and locks them in place, but the child won’t go down. Simply cannot make herself step over the lip and onto the ladder with her back to the darkness below. And though I feel the point of the bowman’s bolt between my shoulder blades, I need no prompting. I take her in my arms, she latches on to me at the waist and the neck, and I hoist us over, clinging to the rails.
I know I should be using the long descent to frame a plan, to be ready to secure something – a hefty stone, a length of metal – but by the time I get us down, rung by rung, to solid ground I’m so knackered I can barely think and it’s all I can do to lower the child to the compacted dirt and then drop down beside her, panting like a heat-struck fowl.
She peers along the tunnel into the distant darkness. Glances up the ladder at the bowman’s silhouette on its way down. Then back at me. In expectation. As I lie there. Winded and helpless.
When I show her the palm of my hand, I’m not sure if I’m imploring her to wait or begging her forgiveness.
If she’s disappointed, she doesn’t show it. In any event, the bowman drops so quickly, hands and boots barely slowing his fall as he clamps against the verticals, sliding down without touching a single rung, that our chance is gone before I can get to my feet.
He hits the dirt with a thud. Before he’s even turned to face us, he has the bow back in his hands.
Out of puff, old timer? he says, casting about as if he’s seeing the place anew with us in it.
I get slowly to my feet. The child reaches, takes a fistful of my sodden pants leg.
You could’ve had me then, he says.
I don’t want to fight.
Yet.
I’m tired of fighting.
Maybe you’re just tired, full stop.
Both, I confess. Maybe you are too. Because if you wanted to see me off clean, you missed your best chance already.
Who says I want to do you clean?
It’s a long climb up with a weight like mine on your back.
You don’t think I have a block and tackle?
Seems like a lot of trouble.
I can manage a bit of trouble.
Me, I could do with less of it.
He shrugs. And yet here you are.
We don’t have to be trouble.
Somehow I doubt that.
But, as you say, here we are. Still alive.
Maybe I’m just thorough.
Good for you. And for your training.
And maybe I’m a bit curious.
The pair of us? Showing up like this? Who wouldn’t be?
I’ve met plenty who wouldn’t.
Strange days, comrade.
Let’s go, he says.
He palms a switch. A chain of tubes illuminates the chamber, a deep horizontal, high and wide, stacked with drums, coils of hose, some improvised domestic furniture. In the distance, maybe thirty metres yonder, a chain-link barrier.
It’s hard to get a read on the extent of this bolthole, but it feels bigger than what I can see. Some of it looks hand-hewn, but the ceiling bears the broad sweeps of machine cuts. The shoring is steel, the braces hydraulic.
This is some find, I say.
Keep walking.
We do as we’re told. At the wire enclosure, we stop to survey the stacked crates and drums on the other side. It takes a moment to notice the gate. And the lock. The hasp is open.
You want to lock us up?
Do I look like a fool?
You can trust us, comrade.
That’s to be determined.
Fair enough, I say, shepherding the girl forward as casually as I can.
In you go.
The child looks at me. I nod, open the gate and lead her in.
The bowman shuts the barrier behind us and sets the lock. He turns, lays the uncocked crossbow on the table behind him.
You need to know who we are.
That’d be a start.
You want my name?
No, he says.
But you want everything else.
Wouldn’t you?
I would.
So, go for your life, he says. Explain yourself.
The child settles in a soft pool of dirt between some crates. I lower myself to a snap case that reminds me of a transport shell – field kit.
The bowman drags out a chair. He sits with his boots against the mesh, reefs off his hat and raises his eyebrows. And I see the situation plainly. If I can’t get through to him, I’ll need to kill him. But there’s no guarantee I can manage either.
You sound like you’re from the east, so you probably won’t know the place, but I was born and raised on the Outer Cape. North of the twenty-third parallel. It’s a peninsula. Two hundred klicks of rocks and red dirt. Only one settlement – a hamlet of five hundred souls on the furthermost shore, just inside the sheltered waters of the gulf. My people were homesteaders. We lived in the hinterland, out on the plain. In the days when you could still get by in that latitude if you knew what you were doing.
Those were better times, but even then it wasn’t a place for the faint-hearted. The sun ate everything in sight and the salt air chewed through anything that wasn’t. The winds came hard off the range and harder still out of the desert across the gulf.
My mother was widowed early. Raised me on her own. But she was a tough unit. Short. Wiry. Handsome in the way even a son will notice. Grey eyes and a bent-kneed stance that always made her look as if she’d just landed after a jump. Her hair was blonde and buzzed tight, so you only saw it indoors, once the hat and scarves came off. Mostly she went about in a wide-brimmer with neck-skirts and her face wrapped, so it was the steely eyes you saw most, the fierce gaze. Hamlet folks were careful around her.
She had heft, my mother. A gravitas I could sense as a child but not explain. She taught me everything. Not just how to behave and how to work and endure with honour. She gave me my letters and numbers and the stories of our people. Also the sagas. I was eligible for hamlet school and lived close enough to be driven in every day, but she never sent me, and I never asked to go.
We were self-reliant, the pair of us. In country as dry and remote as that, homesteaders had to be. We remained citizens in good standing with the Association, rendered our tithe to the Co-op every year without fail, but to hamlet folks homesteaders were a people apart. Aloof. Difficult to read. Hardarses, I guess.
Our compound was a big, dusty triangle buttressed on every side by a levee of compacted soil and rubble. The winterhouse, set toward the southern bund, was up on stilts and airy. We had good, storm-proof sheds and our growhouses had retractable cowls my parents had designed and perfected before I was born. Across the yard, a low parapet of sandbags and a simple A-frame portico marked the entrance to our summer hab. A cluster of cellars and underground cisterns. All interlinked.
The plain was mostly red dirt, spinifex and gibber. From the verandah of the winter place, you could see the distant sheen of the gulf in the east. Behind us, like some mummified leviathan, the long buttress of the range lay between us and the open sea.
This was all the world I knew. And for many years it was all I needed.
Like every good homesteader, I raised plants, to harvest seeds and sow them anew. I could manage egg birds and grind their shit and bones for the soil we brewed from dust. Alongside my mother, I learnt how to patch a circuit, mend a pump, rewind a motor. There were turbines to maintain and arrays to set and adjust and keep clean. I had to know how to nurse and pamper every species of battery, to capture, store and move water, and from the age of seven I drove vehicles – quads, fork-loaders, flatbeds – for the thrill of demonstrating my competence.
I felt like any ordinary plains child. I figured all of us could read a barometer and find our way home alone from the canyons at night. But the fact was, I didn’t know any kids. Apart from the lame boy, that is, and I only saw him at the beginning of winter when his father, the filmlayer, drove out from the hamlet to resurface our grit-pitted walls and roofs. I was always discouraged from making comparisons with anyone else – my mother was strict about this – but with that crippled boy I didn’t need to be told. And I liked him well enough. He taught me checkers. Beat me most years. But then he stopped coming, and I didn’t ask about him.
I never really felt the lack of playmates or friends. On market days in the hamlet, or special days at the wharf, I’d sometimes encounter other children. I watched them. Carefully. They puzzled me. Disappointed me, really. And they seemed leery of me. Whenever I managed to engage them in conversation or to propose a game, they struck me as opaque. Hesitant. Even dull. They were always seeking consent or confirmation from those around them. They seemed unable to do anything on their own initiative. As I grew older, I saw their parents were no different. Not so much that their circuits were on the fritz. More that they were all set to power-reserve mode.
When I shared this thought with my mother she admonished me, but I detected a glint of amusement in her eyes.
There’s nothing wrong with those kids, she said. And you’re no better than any of them. Their parents are good factors and mechanicals. Sound citizens. And they will be too. Having common interest isn’t the same as having interests in common.
I don’t think they like me, I confessed.
Needing people to like you is vain. So is expecting people to be like you. You and I do what we know how to do, and they do what they can, and everyone’s effort is useful. That’s what keeps us all going. Each of us needs a little something of what the other has – food, water, building materials, parts, doctoring, scholarship, labour. Even the bards and jokers have their place.
That’s a trade?
Of course. Folks need to laugh sometimes. But whatever we do, wherever we live – in a hamlet, in the city or on the plain – no citizen is better than any other.
On this point I never questioned my mother, and yet over time I began to see we prospered in ways few others in our district seemed to. For one thing, my mother would never consent to trade for labour. But how could she refuse help unless we could afford to? My mother was an unstinting worker, almost relentless. She gave the very clear impression that the two of us worked harder than most in the district, and while such a notion was hard to verify, the ache in my bones and sinews at day’s end seemed to confirm it.
We raised leaves and herbs of every kind. Our citrus was supreme. In mild years our hives rendered honey that tasted faintly of coriander. We grew rich crops of tomato, corn, okra, squash and eggplant, and no skin or rind of our fruit ever felt the scalding flush of direct sunlight. The first and only moment our produce saw the open sky was when we hefted crates from the trailer into the shade of the hamlet square.
On the plain, every citizen was the equal of their neighbour. And whether they’d made good trade, enjoyed a bumper season, or been blessed by the birth of a child, most maintained the sort of discretion that forestalls envy. There was gossip, of course, as in any small community, but the virtues of circumspection, modesty, generosity and hospitality were valued and rewarded. Not just by the Association, but by those who belonged to it. Which was all of us.
In the hamlet, as out on the homesteads, there was no talk of caste or rank. Civility was paramount. And while everyone understood that some tradesfolk and homesteaders might be more skilled or gifted than others, and some were wiser and probably more diligent, there was no tolerance for lording or vaunting. So much so that folks neither danced nor sang in public for fear of making a spectacle or appearing to put themselves forward.
There’s no question that hard work was valued and laziness frowned upon, but there was no shame in availing yourself of help, whether you traded for it or were granted it freely by a neighbour. And the Co-op indemnified you from any misfortune that might lead to long-term hardship.
So, ours was a decent life. It was orderly. There was purpose in it. Honour, too. And self-respect.
But although the world was steady in the years of my boyhood, it was not always kind. In the hamlet or out on the homesteads, life was a struggle. Winters were hot. The summers lethal. Nearly every soul you met had white scab, and many suffered pink cankers that ate at them slowly. Locals were hardy and adaptable, but it was rare to see people of great age. And, for reasons nobody seemed to understand or discuss, the number of births had already begun to wane.
At the onset of winter, when folks finally came back up from underground, they were looser in their bearing, almost giddy with relief to be out in the open after so many months of languishing in stifling cellars. Within a few days they’d recover their decorum and go about their work. Come September we’d all be dreading the change of season and the return to life below ground.
As a kid, it’s the big events that take up space in your head. The cataclysms of sudden presence – cyclones, locust plagues, lightning sieges, storm surges, flash floods. But as you get older it’s the stuff that doesn’t happen, the things that fail to arrive, that begin to preoccupy you. Cataclysms of absence, I guess you’d say. Like the years the monsoon failed to arrive. That was when you faced the horrors of running dry. Or worse – poaching in your own sweat, and when you couldn’t sweat anymore, grilling from the inside out.
Most of the year we had desert heat. Hard, roasting, wind-driven. If the air is dry and you’re careful, you can survive temps into the fifties. But when it’s muggy, you’re in real trouble. In the summer there were black-sky days without rain when tropical air rolled in from the north like a hostile force to occupy the peninsula for a week or more. No bunker and no fan could spare you that strangling humidity. Within a few days, even with temps down in the thirties, you’d fall prey to heat fever. The panic of the sickness sent folks out of their minds. Survivors were never the same afterwards. You won’t need telling, comrade. You know it well enough. The ordeal – the indignity of it – robs you of something. Forever after, you’re stalked by the shameful mewling thing you became.
So when March arrived, and the big cells rolled down from the death belt of the tropics, we ran the fans hard and prayed we had enough juice in the batts to keep ourselves alive. A day or two of that was tough. Nerve-racking. But a week might be catastrophic. In the middle of one of those events, if you could think at all, you knew there’d be folks coddling and stewing in bunkers and cellars the length of the peninsula. And some of them you’d never see again. Some died when their hearts gave out. Others destroyed themselves before it got that far. And there was no shame in that. Most folks understood the sensation of being possessed by that dread, those avalanches of panic.
Maybe it’s different where you’re from, but in our part of the world, suicide was frowned upon, though it wasn’t censured by the Association. We were hardy folks, but not heartless. We had a firm conception of who we were, and maintained high social expectations, but we were realists. Or at least we thought we were.
Nobody pretended that plains life was easy. We were at the last margin, at the frontier of the tropics, with the desert at our back. Year upon year we held out. And were proud of doing so. Things were less capricious then, so perhaps we could afford to be. We prized steadiness. Not just in people, but in our world. Because steadiness allowed us room enough to endure and make a life. The problem was, we believed this stability was of our own making. The fruit of self-restraint. And although there was some truth in this, it wasn’t the whole story. We had our golden age in a lull, while the world was just dozing.
High on a ridge, at the spine of the range, stood a rock fig so large and sprawling it was as much thicket as tree. In its winter shade, twenty souls or more could work and rest out of sight. Children nested in its downswept boughs, and bowerbirds stole the buttons off their tunics as they slept. Between the tree’s reptilian roots, their parents mended garments, honed blades and kept watch. At dawn and dusk, they went abroad to hunt and forage on the tops. In summer they followed the roots underground, for beneath the tree lay a cave whose deepest gallery brimmed with sweet water. They navigated the darkness by the feel of those rock-splitting roots, climbing from the light to the water and back. To survive the worst of the heat, they lived in the upper chamber, beneath an open roof and a canopy of limbs and leaves, subsisting on dried meats and fruits in the safety of the twilight.
