Black Juice Read online

As it was, my eyes were swelling and my nose was bunged up, and I had a lot of blowing to do and a few pills to take when I got into the Old Girl. Then, ‘That cloud’s thickening,’ said Irini, and soon we were flying down the highway through the middle of the grey blow.

  I did talk with Irini—about Grandma’s sweetness in her old age, about how frequently she reminisced about her time with me in the Meeko-system, about how the world has changed, about how death takes all of us one way or another—that hasn’t changed, we haven’t managed to mess up that system, have we! When her talk faded and her head began to loll, I pulled over, inflated the travel pillow and settled it round her neck. ‘Oh thank you, dear,’ she murmured from inside a fraying dream. ‘Very kind.’

  It was lonelier than driving alone, driving sleeping-Irini. It was midafternoon, but I had to switch the headlights on to find the road. It was like driving down the eye of a tornado, its rings shifting over us, charcoal, dirty cream, mid-grey. The Old Girl’s seals weren’t great, despite what I’d told Nerida. The finer dust was filtering in, powdering Irini’s navy skirt, tickling my sensitive nose. Nerida would have me on the Brassica drops for months after this. Under Irini’s seat, the WundaVerm would be speckled black. Would toxins leach into the mixture and kill off the plants before they started? Or would I drop Irini off, and toil home, and take the tray inside, and put it under the Gazlight, and see, just like in the old documentaries, the first pearly stalk unbend its elbow, wander lightwards, and spread its small green hand? Would they all twelve prove viable, their stalks strengthening, their greenness emerging, thickening, bunching, seemingly out of nothing and for no reason, vibrating slightly in their rows?

  yowlinin

  I WOULDN’T SAY HARROW’S SON WAS HANDSOME—not handsome that people would notice. He’s got a handsomeness that only I can see, so only I watch him. Even he himself doesn’t know about it yet, so he doesn’t preen, like some of the finer town-kids do.

  He’s right below me, skinning munkees. With their fur peeled off, they look like shiny wet people, but longer and thinner. And smaller, of course. He hooks the peeled ones over a branch-stump, lower down my tree. There are too many for him and his dad to use; they must be going to market.

  I could reach down and touch his scumbly hair, with the little bits dried and goldened by the summer. That would freak him, wouldn’t it?—well and truly. One second he’s quickly slitting munkee-skin, the next he’s eye to eye with nutty me, as good as touched by yowlinins himself. I wouldn’t do that to him. Heck, I wouldn’t do that to me. Where would I come, these long days? How would I pass my time?

  He’s grumbling under his breath; none of these kids knows how good they’ve got it. A dad to order you around (a mam, too, most of them); school to go to; a house to provide for; a plough to pull to save your old man’s plough-busted back. Days made, hours filled—to have a duty is a wonderful thing. They should try going without for a week or two; they’d scuttle back to whisk-brooming and munkee-cleaning fast enough. These kids don’t know how long a day can be.

  He goes off to get a sack. The munkees hang there as if they expect a spanking, their skinny backs pink, veined purple. I could pinch one (they make a good pot), but I don’t do that kind of thing now. It’s weird, how my days of mischief just ended. Except, only I know they did; everyone else still thinks I’m out for trouble, whatever I do. I get shooed off places I never even bothered when I was bad.

  Skit, girl, skit you! Get your yowlinin-paws off my stall!

  But I’m not! I’m only looking—

  Get gone. No one buys when you’re hanging around like a smell.

  Here he comes. My, he looks cross, funny boy. Puts away the munkees and ties the bag. He’s got nice hands that know what they’re doing. Man hands, but on a boy body. Takes away the sack, comes back, takes the skins off to the house for stretching.

  Now it’s quiet, but for flies zooming to the drops of munkee-blood. Well, that was good, a good long look. I won’t get another like that for a while. I turn over and lounge along the branch. Through the leaves there’s a sky bright as scrubbed blue-ware. There’s enough wind for his dad’s corn crop to go shushing, shushing, like a mam over her babies when yowlinins is loose.

  I lie there until they go, with their little handcart of earlycorn and munkees. I could go in their house; the dog knows me, and lets me. But there’d be nothing new—I was only there a little while ago. I’ve got the smell of him in my memory and I don’t need to lie on his bed to call it up.

  I get down and cut through the corn, to the road. I sit among the stalks, a little way in, so I don’t show. I wait and watch.

  Here they come. This is the way the world will see him; look how his frown goes and he straightens, as he gets closer to town. If I were a town-girl, his spirit might be lifting for me. I did dream that, once. But when I woke up I was the old touched, unlucky one again, hardly better than munkee myself.

  I wait a while and then follow them up the road, keeping where they can’t see me. Must be a storm coming; the cornsparrows is down hopping among the stalks, instead of up on top taking grain out of the cob-ends. I look all around the edges of the polished sky. Nothing yet.

  Market’s starting to buzz when I get there. I go up on the steps of the cornstore and settle; I figure if they see me not making mischief long enough … Well, what will happen? They will welcome me as bosom-family? Maybe not that. Maybe they’ll just stop skitting me whenever I come near. But it takes luckies a while to notice things.

  I’m in the sun, but the sun is not quite warm. Usually I get dozy here, but today there’s a tickling breeze, smelling of the faraway sea. I went there once, though no one here believes me.

  It’s true. Bigger than yowlinins, and all along the shore, there’s this wild-water, crashing and crashing. It’s like madness to stay there—

  Yeah, and you’d know that. They touched you in the head, didn’t they? The kids were hanging along the schoolyard fence, kicking the low-rail.

  Touched her all over, I heard, says another with a dirty laugh.

  I tell you, even your head couldn’t hold such noise, such size of water. On and on to a flat line of nowhere, all boiling! I was full of it. I’d been sure they’d want to hear; I know better now. Lucky people don’t want news. They want to know that things are the same—that they’re still lucky, hey.

  Anyway, I did go. I know what the sea looks like. And smells like: like this, that I can smell now, salt and rubberweed on the air, and as if it’d be easier the second time, to stand in the sandhills and watch those water-beasts fighting and falling into the beach. It’s a bit magic, the sea, I think; puts its call in you, and forever after it can tweak you by the nose, by that smell, any time.

  Can’t understand why it’s so busy here today, everyone out and milling like ants readying for rain. People lean at the frippery stall, fingering the blue-ware figurines; everyone does loud chat with the goat-man and the corn-wives and the donkey-carter. I listen in for gossip, but it’s nothing; gloomy weather-talk, crop-talk, babies and marriages and money. No one’s in a hurry to go home. There are a lot of families around who should be in fields cutting corn; it’s best to get in what crop you can, as it comes good, so you’ve got plenty stored against storm or monster. If I’d my land, that was my mam and dad’s, that’s what I’d be doing. But I was too young when they were tooken, and the land went into the rent-box, and now is fallow under Goodman Thatcher.

  I sniff the sea-ish air and look around for my boy. His dad is settled with the other old men, two steps below me. Harrowson will be dealing at the cornstore, or even already—ah, there!—standing by the butcher, keeping the flies off the show-munkee propped over the sack. By the size of the sack, he’s already sold a couple. I can read his lips, even hear him a little: Trap-munkees, good and fresh! Pot these up with garlicroot and taters and they’re good as hutch-rabbit. Tasty trapmunkees, fresh as fresh!

  I must have had hutch-rabbit once, but I wouldn’t remember. Now, wild-ra
bbit I know well—nasty little beasts made of string. But better than nothing when you’ve wandered a way from the town.

  Then something happens under my eyes that makes me forget my love-boy, makes me forget just about everything I know.

  It looks like a stone, a smooth, biscuity-coloured stone, the size of my thumbnail, on the step next to my foot. It starts rocking, all by itself, jerkily. I stare at it. I draw my knife and steady the stone with the point. I can feel in the handle just a very small squirm, from inside the stone. I’m still not scared, even seeing the tiny split happen along the side; I’ve seen so many different things hatch, from your ordinary cackle-bird to those frog babies that pop out of their mams’ backs in Fenny Brook. The beetle inside it pushes the shell apart, and even then I admire it, so round-backed and shiny, with red or green wing-cases depending on which way it catches the light. Pretty as jewellery.

  Then I see the short black sucking-tube of its face. I paw the nearest shoulder.

  It’s my boy’s dad. ‘Hands off me, yowlinin-toy, left-behind.’ He shrugs away from me, but he must see my horrified face, and he looks down, and he has one glimpse of the jewel-drop of beetle before it hoists up its skirts and flies thrrrrrrr! up away between us.

  ‘What was that?’ he says to me, although he knows.

  ‘They’re coming again.’ Such small words, and I say them so softly.

  I would give my knife and the arm that holds it to have him spit on me, or laugh, or rouse at me. Or just turn away and settle back to corn-talk with the other men. But his face—well, mine must look the same, all eyes and nostrils. And he gets down backwards off the steps, and backs into the market. His eyes keep coming to mine; we saw what we saw, didn’t we?, we ask each other, and the sight of each other asking is our answer.

  He pushes through to his son, and tries to drag him away by the arm. The boy puts up a fight—What about all these good munkees? To get him moving the dad says, All right, bring them, and the boy gathers them up, angry and puzzled. He tries to follow his dad’s last fearful glance at me, but he’s not used to seeing me, not used to noticing; he’s still searching the faces on the cornstore steps as his dad hurries him out of the square to where the carts are minded.

  Maybe none of that just happened. The chat goes on, the swap of coin and goods, the fingering of fruit, the eyeing of meat. But now there’s a beetle-case broken on the step. Over everything, the sky, clean of even a skerrick of cloud, is like a person looking away and whistling.

  I pick up the beetle-case and stand up on my step. ‘Hey! Listen!’ My voice sounds mad and shrill, even to me. I hold up the evidence. ‘I just saw a dormer-beetle hatching! Here, see? Right here on this step!’

  A chill goes out through the crowd; a quietness opens for me to shout it out again. ‘A dormer-beetle. You know what that means!’ I look out at all their eyes. A few people leave straight away—why don’t they all? You’ve got to spread out wide for yowlinins—you gather, they head for the clump, and take every one of you.

  A fruit-lady is first. ‘You’ve got monsters on the brain, girl,’ she says into the silence, and relieved laughs go up around her.

  A mother with a baby: ‘How dare you try such trouble! How dare you put a scare on us!’

  ‘She’s touched, that’s all,’ says one of the mayor’s men.

  ‘I’ve got the case here! I saw it with my own eyes! So did Goodman Harrow—he was right here talking with you old ones, only a moment ago, and now he’s fled! He took his son, that was selling munkees—do you see either of them now?’

  That brings an even horribler silence. One of the old men totters upright. ‘Show me the case, girl. A dormer-beetle is very like a ruby-beetle.’

  ‘Yes, it could easily be a mistake,’ says the fruit-lady.

  I check my memory. ‘No, there was green on it. And I saw the snout. Harrow saw, and he fled—you’d believe him, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Maybe, if he were here to speak.’

  ‘I wouldn’t credit anything that drunkard has to say.’

  Now the old man has finished examining the case, and he takes a step up, leaning on his stick. I see his smirking face and my heart sinks.

  ‘It’s a ruby, all right,’ he cries, handing the pieces back to me.

  People cheer and clap. I look into his eyes and see how pleased he is to have bettered me.

  ‘He’s blind!’ I shout. ‘I saw the wings, green and red. I tell you, he wouldn’t see his own poke-pole if it reared up at midday! Harrow’s gone, Harrow’s putting up shutters and burying coin. That’s what all of you should be doing—’

  But smack! The frippery-woman is at me from the side. She wallops my head and drags me off by the ear—to cheers and laughter.

  ‘Have you outlawed, I will!’ she hisses into my face. ‘I had a pearl necklace I’ve been trying to shed for months! Right up against the lady’s neck, it was, and her reaching for her purse, when you—’ She gives me another thump and a shake. ‘You freak her with this monster-talk, this trickery. And now she’s gone, and months again before another likely buyer comes through here.’

  ‘’S not trickery,’ I manage.

  ‘You’re a thief and a savage, and you’ve never uttered a true word in your life—and now you’ve near ruined me, you scrawny scrag-end, and the mayor’ll hear of it, don’t you worry. I’ll have you run out of town, you curse!’ And she flings me in the wet-alley running by the cornstore, right on a pile of stink that clogs on my shoulder. And she’s gone, but a bright-eyed bunch of market-kids is there with bad eggs and cabbage stalks to throw. I pick my way up the alley with all of that thumping into my back.

  I get out of town. I’m wild, I can tell you, shaking with their stupidity and the terrible smells on me. And with straight fear, too. Do they forget, that the person who’d be most scared of yowlinins is me? How would someone who’d ever seen them, let alone been tossed about by them, tossed aside for the bigger meat of her dad and mam, ever make a trick of them? They just don’t know; they’re just too lucky.

  The two halves of the beetle-case hurt my hand from being clutched so hard. I open it up. He’s right, it is very like a ruby-beetle’s. But it had a snout. I saw it. To suck up the drool.

  I was hardly out of napkins back then. They found me playing with the dormers, patting the sheets of them gathered on the puddles, of drool plain and drool-and-blood mixed. (I heard all this over the schoolyard fence, and from Goodwoman Pratt who used to leave me food and rags on her back step, until her goodman beat her for it. All I remember is a huge woman bending down out of the sky, exclaiming.)

  I’m hurrying, I don’t know where. Nowhere’s safe. Yowlinins come up anywhere, everywhere, and they roam too, and drool on everything—from their mouths, sure, but also from all their skin, which is like snails’, green-grey, with froth on. They’re big, tasselly things, so the drool sprays all over, and whatever they drool on you can’t eat any more, even if it were the tiniest droplet. If they’ve thrown themselves across your cornfield, you can’t count on much of your crop; if they’ve shooken about in your herd and it goes on a cow’s tongue, or in its ear, that cow dies—and this ruin’s on top of any people you might lose, if people you have, and if you don’t get lost yourself.

  I hurry across pasture towards the forest, thinking to get up high, to have some kind of view. Then I get a hideous feeling in my feet, like the ground can’t be trusted. ‘Aagh!’ I shout, and go hopping across this herd-grass, watching the clumps of pea-bed daisies in case any should start to wobble. Part of me is interested that I know to do this, even if it is so long since yowlinins last came. (People always say, They might not come ever again, but older people always answer, They might come tomorrow, too, so put away corn.)

  And then—like a bad dream, when your fear makes the feared thing happen—yes, a daisy clump does shake, and slowly uproot itself. I stop hopping, and stare to make sure it’s not just my eyes making tricks, and then I run, and I’m shouting, too, because shouting helps me r
un faster, and anyway others are shouting and screaming, behind me, in town. I’m running for the only tree I can get to fast, Harrow’s tree. There’s just too much endless field between here and the forest! The ground—yow!—is starting to blip and bump up like thick, slow-boiling porridge. I seem to fly, running fast on my very toe-tips, and even when the first yowlinin blasts up out of Harrow’s corn crop, so ghastly high in its shower of dirt and drool, I keep running, darting around it like it’s only a tree itself, not a frothing monster, with a howling hunger in it.

  I make the tree, uneaten, amazed, stupid with fright. I scramble up, into the middle, as if the flimsy leaves will protect me, as if the skinny branches will hold me safe. And I curl up like a baby, thinking, How ever can I be so lucky again, as I was? Can a person be tossed aside twice in her life? They’ve got teeth, I just saw, like long grey thorns, massed in their mouths. They would have picked me up in their teeth to toss me, last time—by a miracle they only holed my clothes, not my skin.

  And now the teeth are everywhere, bursting up all over the country. The yowlinin cry is like a night cat’s, spoiling for a fight, a terrible baleful rising drone, exploding to thuds and screeches. I can’t think, only curl as tight as my muscles will pull me. I’m not even here—or I won’t be, soon. Any moment now, out of their earth-shaking, out of that horrible wailing that bends your bones and won’t shut up, one of them will come, one of them will find me, one of them will finish the job, good and proper.

  GREEN LEAVES, HEART-SHAPED, crowds of them. Their stalks are yellow, and the yellow strikes down the middle of each leaf and fans out into the green. On the smooth brownred tree arm are oval spots, silver-grey like munkee fur. Through the leaves above me, that same shiny-dinnerplate sky. It all looks so fresh after the squished red-black of my eyelids. It’s quiet and still; it has been for ages. A lifeless quiet, without a bird in it; no rustle of corn, no shift of beast in byre or field.