Black Juice Page 11

  I’m crouched in a ball when the thing plummets out of the mist, clattering. I shriek and spring open, banging my head on the rock. The smell hits me like a fistful of filthy hot sand.

  ‘Mortal child,’ says the angel. It’s a reddish shadow in the mist, very tall, with a tremendous chest, no arms, and of course wings, like two sheaves of kindling-brush gathered in to its back. Its heat pushes me flat against the rock. Its eyes fix on me, red and rheumy as a drunk’s, brainy as a priest’s or showman’s. Why would I bother a creature such as this, that can fly, for goodness’ sake—

  ‘Your offering?’ Its voice is like a sheep-flock scattering in panic, the big ewes baying, the lambs squealing, all in the same sound.

  ‘Oh!’ I scrabble for the cheese. My fingers don’t work very well. As I unwrap it, the paper pulls the belly-warmed cheese all out of shape. I step into the heat and lay the stretched, stuck mess on the ground, in the cloud of steam the red feet are raising from the wet rock.

  The angel drops, props itself on its iron wing-claws and dips its head, like a gunney-bird into a corpse-cavity. With its teeth it shakes cheese and paper in two. It gulps down the first piece, moves springily to the second. Wrapping and all, that cheese, which Nan and Pa and I would have eked out over a week and maybe more, is gone, and the angel has swung to its feet, cheese-grease all up one cheek …

  And now it’s having some kind of fit of indigestion. Its throat rasps as if the cheese-paper is caught there, and it sways and stamps, its wings half-spread, swiping close to my face. Something is wrong with the cheese, or the paper, and the thing could unzip me with one of those claws, throat-to-thigh in a moment, for sickening it.

  It retches twice, showing me the white ribs roofing its mouth. Its red-gold eyes weep and roll. Then it spits two bright, wet things, thwap!, thwap!, at my feet—yellow-hot pellets, sheathed in a thick jelly.

  Harrumph! It wipes its mouth on its shoulder-mass. ‘You were saying about your nan?’ it hums.

  ‘Huh?’ Nan? I’d forgotten. Nan has never been smaller or greyer in my mind. ‘I—I think she’s dying,’ I blurt. ‘She’s maybe dead by now.’

  The angel looks at the moon. It stretches its face like a cat yawning—eeagh. ‘Not quite. But soon. You’ll need to walk fast, earth-mite. Redden your legs some. I’ll precede you, ah?’

  ‘Oh.’ I have to think a bit to make sense of its noise. ‘All right. You don’t need—you know the way, then?’

  The angel’s eye-blazes sweep down to me. With a claw-tip it rolls the dimming gold pellets towards me, coating them with dirt.

  ‘Oh—aye. Thank you—’ It’s like picking up warm turds. I put the slippery things in my trouser pocket. The front of my clothes is dry, the front of my hair, from the angel; steam tickles up the back of me, meeting a cold-sweat-dribble coming down.

  The angel launches itself straight up. Its wings snap open, and its worm-root smell blasts out. Then I’m cold and damp and blind again, with the moon gone behind a cloud, and the water fighting to free its head in the gorge below.

  IT’S NEARLY DAWN. Pa’s pacing up and down the fence like a penned puppy. When he sees me he makes a leap of frustration.

  ‘It got here, then?’ I call when he’ll hear me.

  ‘The blamed thing! Nobody said it’d—It’s—’ He’s gibbering angry. ‘It’s sprayed all around the place with its bloody smell, that’ll never go! It’s mad as a cut-snake—You can’t talk to it—It sings, like having your ears sawn off!’ A rough braying starts up inside the house. ‘Hear it!’

  The windows and doorway glow orange. ‘It’ll be hot in there,’ I say.

  ‘All that firewood!’ He’s nearly weeping. Pa’s fires are always mean and miserly; building a blaze like that is like gnawing direct on his heart. ‘’Twould of seen us through three winters, husbanded right—’

  ‘And Nan?’

  He’s angry again. ‘Can I tell? Can I get near the woman for that production going on?’ He follows me into the bright house. ‘The damned creature—’

  A stink like fireworks, a sound like accordions being bashed apart against trees, the fire blaring up the chimney. The angel squats on the table, working itself up to a crimson pitch. Veins seem to burst into sweat on its neck, running down, dripping off it. Its head clanks the lamp, which is turned up full as Pa would never have it. Bright yellow light and shadows of the lamp-case giddy about on the walls.

  In the middle, Nan sprouts from the bed, her chopped hair all cockscombed from being lain on, the sheets like a swirl of mud around her hips. She has no colour of her own; she’s angel-oranged pleats and bristles, against an orange wall. Even her eyes are oranged over, the pupils pinpricked to nothing.

  I fight through the stenches to get to her, to make her lie down. But her body is stuck upright, all bands and wires. If I push her down, her knees will come up stiff, and we’ll both be ridiculous.

  I can’t think with the din. I put my face in my hands, down on her kneebone through the grey sheets. My nan and pa raised me to be useful, but there’s nothing I can do here. This is like a big wind, a bad rain, where you just have to sit inside and hope that the roof holds, where you can do nothing ’til after, when it’s clear what’s damaged and what’s gone altogether.

  The lamp crashes to the table, cutting off the angel’s roar. I start up, but the thing stops me with its clever red eyes, crushing the flames out of the spreading oil with its feet. Silence billows out with the burnt-leather smell; even the hearth-fire spouts up soundless; Pa’s mouth makes anguished shouts at the door, but he’s no noisier than a fiddle-string, coiled and tied in its box.

  And through the silence comes something immense and leisurely, that sheds the filth of the heavens from its dusty wings, to dim the hearth-fire, to lower the angel’s greasy red lids over its eyes’ intelligence, to bow down my pa in the doorway.

  Whatever it is, it comes for all of us, ant or angel, lost child in the forest or lady and lord of manners. Tonight it’s come for my nan, and it gathers her up out of the thing that was her self, up out of her own bones into its dark, dirty, soft, soft breast, unfisting her hands from the front of her nightshirt, laying down her remains, moving her on from us like a storm cloud dragging its rain.

  Behind it, the night is suddenly vaster, colder, clearer. All the stars zing; the mountains glitter; towns and villages gather like bright mould in the valley-seams and along the coasts. Every movement in byre and bunny-hole, of leaf against leaf, of germ in soil and stream, turns and gleams and laminates every other, the whole world monstrously fancy, laced tight together, yet slopping over and unravelling in every direction, a grand brilliant wastage of the living and the dying.

  PA WAKES ME up—hours later, it must be. I’m curled on the bed around Nan’s dead feet. The chill is back on the house, the fire a few red winkings in the hearth. Nothing is in its right place; I remember, I had some dreams that yammered and beat at the walls.

  Pa has that dragged-through-a-bush look he gets when he drinks; his eyes could be weeping or just watery from the spirits. He yanks me off Nan, and hauls me outside. He flings me down in the yard-corner.

  ‘Bury her there, that angel said,’ he challenges me. ‘So dig, boy.’ He brings the spade, hurls it at me, lurches inside where he falls, and swears, and skitters something across the floor, and stays down.

  I lie there a little while, listening to pig-snuffles and cowplods. It’s too early for birds; there’s a low moon, strong stars.

  Then I up and reach for the spade, because my stiff body needs to dig, because my nan needs to be in the ground, safe from Pa forever.

  With the first bite of the spade into the earth, there’s something different, juicier, lumpier than it should be. When I turn the soil, giant pearls fall out of it; some roll away; others, split by the blade, gleam white and wet in the starlight: tiny potatoes, no bigger than quail-eggs, thousands of them. They’re grown so thickly, I have to not so much dig them as sift the soil out from among them with my hands.
I eat one, and it crunches like wet stars, but tastes like sweet earth. It needs no salt or softening; it needs nothing but a mouth that’s ready.

  When I’ve dug out the whole crop, there’s a Nan-sized hole, earth heaped to one side, a greater pile of potatoes to the other.

  I step over snoring Pa, into his beaten house. I carry out the little that’s left of my nan, the cloth of her stiffened with disuse. I lay her in the earth. I draw the bedsheet over not-her-face and bury her. I gather runners of grass, lay a cross-work of them over the grave and water them in well.

  I’m hurrying now. I’ll take not quite half the potatoes, in this sack. I’ll wash before I go. I’ll take this spare shirt of Pa’s and the trousers—

  I strip off at the pump. Something in the trouser-pocket makes a hard noise on the ground. Angel-pellets. They’ve stuck to the cloth; when I pull them free, they’re brown, withered, and covered with pocket-litter. I lay them on the stone edge of the trough, and when I’m clean and dressed and booted, I take my knife and cut into one rubbery casing, to a harder core. I put my thumbs into the knife slit and pull it hard apart.

  My knife has nicked the waist of a fat bean of gold. I roll it in my hand, feeling the weight, perhaps three coins worth. That’d pay us well for a whole year’s cheeses. I think for a while, then slit the other pellet and place it open on the trough-rim. Let Pa find it, let a bird take it—I’m past caring, and I won’t go back in that house.

  I hoist my spud-sack onto my back. I leave the wreck of my pa on the floor, the husk of my nan in the ground. I get clear of Pa’s shambling fences, and turn onto the road that leads down to the plain. The plain has towns and markets; it has smiths and shipwrights and mill-owners. A strong lad like me must be some earthly use to someone, down there, if he walks far enough.

  perpetual light

  SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HERE AND WAGGA, the winds were stirring up some metal. It took three ‘Hellos?’ before I even knew my mother was on the line.

  ‘Just quietly overnight, it was. No alarm. The manager said she looked very peaceful; must’ve just gone quietly, no pain.’

  Mum started telling me the funeral arrangements. I turned away from my project on the kitchen table and scribbled on the wall with near-dry marker.

  ‘All the way out to Greville?’ I said dismayed.

  ‘It’s what she wanted, Daphne. She arranged it all herself and it’s paid for and done.’

  ‘But Greville? There’s nothing there! It’s a ghost town, a filthy wasteland—’

  ‘It’s the town of your Gran’s childhood, Daph, and she always meant to be buried there.’

  ‘And so far…’ Distance meant fuel; it meant money, which I didn’t have …

  ‘So I’ve organised a priest, and for that neighbour lady, Irini, to go out there with the body, and for the council to open the church, and for the hearse, and burial in the graveyard there. As I said, your Gran set it all up—all they needed was details of the date and time.’

  And you did all this before you called me—but I didn’t say that. Mum’s family is wildly political. Put any three together, and two of them will start excluding the third. It was one of the things that drove my dad away. I’d made up my mind it was going to stop with me, that tradition.

  I put down the phone feeling slightly sick. ‘Nice timing, Gran,’ I groaned. I sat down at the table. The power had been iffy for weeks, and everyone was using Gazlights, which gave a very bright light, but localised. The white WundaVerm packet, the seeds in their sachet, the planter tray, all gleamed on the shining table, but beyond was dimness.

  I took out my cards and shuffled through them, but the circle was complete, hopelessly locked; I needed to inject some real cash to get it moving again.

  I found my PalmPlot and went through my accounts. Forty-three cents in the cheque account, a big void in the Knowledge Nation account waiting for the next draught of scholarship. Petrol credits from Freedom’s April Offer—they’d get me to Greville, but not back again. But the Old Girl badly needed a service, and from somewhere legitimate—the funeral was Thursday and I didn’t have time to wait for Giglio to get spare time to do it.

  I sighed. There’d been so many other times this year when I could’ve afforded Grandma dying—why couldn’t she have done it then? It wasn’t as if she’d even been properly alive, much of the last few years. I never want to get like that, lying like a slug in a bed, with nurses having to turn me and wash me and—

  The Getaway account blinked up on my screen. Two thousand and four. If it went below two thousand, the transaction fees would send it straight into freefall. By the time the scholarship money came through I’d have lost another five hundred on top of the five hundred I’d need for the service and petrol. But the Getaway was my emergency account; I’d set it up just so I didn’t have to borrow from friends when this kind of thing hit.

  ‘Not happy, Gran,’ I said, prodding the screen to make the transfer. I clicked off the ’Plot and took the Gaz into the front room to hunt down Statner’s friend’s number, the guy who knew everything about plants.

  ‘THEN YOU COVER THE SEEDS with the germinating medium, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘And that’s it,’ said Statner’s friend—from inside a blizzard, it sounded like. ‘Then you wait. And if nothing comes up in two weeks, you got dudded on the seeds. Which happens a lot, so don’t be put off.’

  ‘Well, they weren’t exactly cheap …’ And I wasn’t exactly in a position to buy fresh ones whenever I felt like it.

  There was a little tantrum of static. ‘… worry, after a while you develop a feeling for viable ones. And their purveyors.’

  ‘And then—if they are viable—it’s just a matter of keeping the water up to them?’

  ‘And the mixture, in the doses I told you. Listen, I’ve got to head off. Got to meet my mole from the Commonwealth Nutri-domes. Say hi to Statner for me, okay? And thank him. Always good to find a new recruit.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Thanks for your help.’

  The furry rushing sound of the open line collapsed into a clean dead beeping. I put down the phone and picked up the scissors. I snipped open the sachet. The seeds inside were like dried peas, lifeless and unpromising. Then I sliced through the WundaVerm’s thick plastic. The stuff looked like white gravel with sequins stirred through. I wished I had music to steady my hand through this. But my sound system had gone bung a week ago, and it’d be another six weeks now until I could afford to fix it. I washed my hands with AntiBacto and got started.

  ‘I DON’T LIKE THE IDEA AT ALL,’ said Nerida the Naturopath. ‘Especially after that flu.’

  ‘I know, but it’s not as if I’ve got a choice. She’s the only grandmother I knew properly. I’m her only grandchild.’

  Nerida gave a defeated sigh. Sometimes I hated to think what a disappointing place the world must be to this woman. ‘Well, you know what I’m here for: the whole organism. I can see that if you don’t do this, you’ll selfflagellate until you’re sick. So just go. Go, and we’ll do some serious stripping out of toxins when you get back. You’ve got your injections organised?’

  ‘I go there straight after this.’

  She made a releasing movement with her hands. ‘Just be careful, is all I ask. Don’t lose sight of the precautions in any moment of emotion. Your car’s sealed okay?’

  ‘It’s pretty good.’

  She glowered at me. ‘Daphne, I know the kinds of vehicles you students drive.’

  ‘This one is all right in the seals department. And it’s just been serviced. I spent three hundred on the Old Girl.’ Ah, the pain.

  She waved me away. ‘Go. Do what you have to do.’

  THE SNIPPET BEHIND THE DOCTOR’S COUNTER was very full of herself this morning. ‘I’m sorry. Compassionate Allowance doesn’t cover excursions for grandparents’ funerals.’

  I’d dealt with her before, though. ‘I spoke to Inge McCormack at the Department. I have a case number. She sa
id it would be all right.’ I held out the number.

  She didn’t take it. ‘The rule’s very clear on this,’ she scolded. ‘If we start making exceptions—’

  I reached over and stuck the note to her phone-base. ‘You talk to Ms McCormack about exceptions. I’ve already had this argument.’ I sat down and started leafing through the latest Celebrity Plus. She made the call; she made a fuss, went silent, tut-tutted, caved in. She banged around with her keyboard and files, sighing a lot. I paged through Anorexia Chic and Parched-Blueberry Crumble, listening to the snippet and feeling pleased with myself.

  It wasn’t so great walking out of there, though; I felt as if they’d sewn a golf ball into my bum-cheek. I’d have to sit on it all the way to Greville.

  Your suspension needs looking at, the bloke at Artisan Autos had said.

  How much’s worth of looking? I’d asked straight away. He told me and I nearly swooned. Will it get me to Greville and back as it is?

  He sniffed. Depends. If you’re careful. Corrugations should be all right, but you don’t want to hit any big potholes at speed.

  That’s okay. I can be careful, I said, breathing again.

  SO HERE I WAS, driving out onto the pre-dawn Treeless Plain. The road ahead seemed to be steaming in the headlights’ beams, the way the dust blew around on it. Flurries of the stuff hissed into the windscreen. It’d be hiss and fwump for a few hundred kilometres.

  The seed tray was under the passenger seat, with my dad’s olden-days textbooks fore and aft holding it steady. I didn’t want to miss anything. And I didn’t know anyone who’d mind them in the right spirit. And they were extra incentive to drive gently.

  I clicked Overdrive on and puffed out relief. I had a functional car, safe seed tray, bloodstream swimming with antibodies. All I had to do now was stay awake and keep the Old Girl pointed in the right direction.