Calvaria Fell, page 11
“They were yours when you were a little girl,” Maud said. “See that mark underneath? That was so your sister couldn’t say they were hers.”
It seemed real when Maud said it.
Kate strapped them on. She clung to the walls and to the other children, grabbed onto the fake plants, held onto the backs of chairs, all the while laughing her head off.
“We have a few more pairs around somewhere,” Izzy said. “In the sporting goods store.” No one liked to venture there much. The smell of old rubber, leather and plastic, and the resulting smell of the metal, made it unpleasant. They told each other a team of footballers’ ghosts lived there, kids who died in a bus crash on the way to a match.
The sporting goods store was on the second floor, in a back corner. Irma hadn’t seen much of this area before and took it all in. There was a shoe shop, smelling like fresh leather, a delightful smell. A gift shop, mostly stripped, but with a few items left on the shelf. And “We buy gold.” She doubted there was anything left in there, but she’d check it out later.
“We’re still making lists of all this stuff,” Maud told her. “In case people want it.” The gift store had a fake fireplace, oddly, and a grandfather clock that was clearly made of carboard.
The sporting goods shop was a delight. It was still pretty well-stocked; people weren’t so keen on do it yourself sports these days. Thinking that she could convince some of the delivery drivers to stay for a bit if she entertained them (and in the back of her mind she was planning a party), she collected things that they could play with. She found a soft ball and bat set (Nerf Fun, it was called) and a game of quoits, and there was plenty more she could come back for.
The roller skates were piled in a corner, in a bit of a mess. “We keep adding them when we find them,” Maud said. “No one’s ordered any yet, but you watch, I bet they do now.”
There were enough pairs for all of those who’d followed along. Bean and Sally both cried; their feet were too small. But Maud, Izzy, Irma, Carlo, Josh and Marty all joined Kate. They wheeled around the shop, screeching with laughter, falling over, pulling themselves up, falling over again.
Then Marty rolled out the door of the shop. The passageway out the front was much more slippery, and he headed toward the stairs, much faster than he’d planned. He squealed, a high-pitched sound that had the others trying to race after him but falling over themselves. Irma tore her roller skates off and joined the chase, only to see him slip backward and land with a crack on the back of his head.
“Kate! Run down and get my bag! Maud! Takes his skates off.” Marty wasn’t responding. When she held his eyelids open, the whites of his eyes showed. All her old training kicked in. She’d done part of a medical degree before shifting to nursing; it was her nursing stuff that helped her here. She’d always been good at this. She’d just been sidetracked by life.
—
Irma felt more attached to the children after this. They changed in the way they looked at her; they trusted her now. They loved her, she thought, or at the very least admired her and were grateful to her. Marty had a headache and a massive bandage around his head, but he was apart from that okay. She stopped in at Young World to find gifts for them all, knowing in her heart they had all they needed. She found them clean socks, packets of handkerchiefs, scarves. She made a pot of spaghetti sauce with lots of hidden vegetables. They all ate it, although they made it clear they preferred Izzy’s cooking.
—
The delivery bell rang. Most of the drivers didn’t bother; they just left the stuff on the dock, or piled up outside the walls. So Irma knew it was her favorite, the one called Robbo. and who she rather liked. It had taken her a while to realize there were a few of them; they all looked quite similar. He was in the Children’s Services truck and by now she had realized it was the children providing the service rather than the other way around.
Everything was laid out on the deck. Garbage bags full, boxes, crates, and one white Styrofoam box, addressed to the Dead Letter Office.
Irma wanted to look in, but the driver stopped her. “Best not to know some things,” he said. He offered her a cigarette. She saw then that he’d clearly been in a fight. His face was bruised and two of his fingers bandaged. A partially healed cut split his cheek. Irma touched it gently.
“Some arsehole,” he said. “Jumped me out of the blue. They got him, though. He’s in the Factory, will be there for a while.”
They stood together, smoking. One of the children appeared in the doorway and Robbo tried to hide his cigarette, but Irma said, “They don’t care. It’s not like these kids’ll ask questions. I love them to bits, but it freaks me out a bit that they don’t ask any questions.
“Maybe they can’t see the point in knowing stuff. Maybe they’d rather not know.”
“But they talk about their parents; they just don’t know anything about them. They’re always talking about them being at work, without really knowing what that means.” She pointed to buildings in the distance. “Like, that’s where they are. Right? In the Factories. And they think being here is all about how old they are. Not about their parents and what they owe society.”
“Some people deserve to be in there,” he said. He took another drag of his cigarette and winced as if his cut lip gave him pain.
“Sooo?” she said.
“Misunderstanding,” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time, wrong assumption about what I was doing.”
Bean and Sally appeared beside them. “There you are!” Bean said. “Hiding!” Maud came up behind them.
“It’s all about keeping them safe, right?” Robbo said quietly.
Maud remembered something of life out there. The sense of a “lack of safety.” Whereas here she felt secure. Even with the younger boys battling it out to be “the boss,” with Julian gone, they were easily reminded of the other life, and of the importance of looking out for each other.
—
After Robbo left, Irma watched the children unpack. The Styrofoam box had gone straight to the post office. She’d look at that later.
They unpacked a box of out-of-date breakfast bars they had received in exchange for a crate of flattened drink cans. The bars were full of marshmallows and chocolate, and while the nutrition panel claimed they covered 5% of daily needs, they also covered 95% of salt and sugar limits.
The children loved them.
Irma felt sleepy and half-drunk. Watching them, she wondered if they understood what they were doing. She’d packed up her grandmother’s house and the contrast here, of these children unpacking a stranger’s belongings and claiming stories, was so very different she wondered if they saw the metaphor of unpacking a life, of naming items in order to own them.
Maud saw a shoebox, battered but intact, and claimed it. It was unlikely to hold actual shoes but you never knew. Mind you there were plenty upstairs in the shoe shop. A small percentage you had to match up, but most were already in pairs. Maud and Josh liked pairing the shoes with outfits. She said, “Josh! Maybe we’ll find an animal print pair in here to go with the coat you found!” It was a magnificent coat, soft, long, sleek. Josh had it hanging on a mannequin near the stage.
“I hope not,” Josh said, but he smiled.
Inside the shoebox was a teacup set, carefully wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. Cup, saucer, plate, not chipped, barely used, but very old.
“Oh, look!” Maud said. She turned the cup (cream, with a dark green stripe around the rim) over in her hands. She pretended to sip delicately from it. “This belonged to my grandmother. One day I went to visit her and we sat in the car and watched people play football and drank tea from these tea cups.” She thought for a moment. “I drank Milo, she drank tea. But then something happened to her and she dropped her tea onto her lap and burnt herself and died.”
Josh made a sad face, although he was clearly more focused on unpacking. Maud could picture the scene in her head but the memory seemed wrong, because of the light. Her brain kept shifting it to the Emporium but she knew she’d been outside once.
Carlo dug down into a pillowcase that had pictures of cartoon animals (a lion grooming his mane with an enormous comb, an elephant with loops of string tied around its toes, a leopard in running shoes). “Ooh, I found something for Sally.” It was a small metal cup, designed for a young child, with a big handle and the etching of a teddy bear.
“Here you go,” he said, handing it to Sally.
Sally stared blankly.
“It was a present from the people next door,” Maud said. She was the best at getting stories started. “They gave it to you when you turned one. It used to belong to their little boy but he died.”
“How?” Sally asked, entranced.
Maud held the cup. “Not poison,” she said. “It was a terrible accident. He was playing on the roof and fell off. He thought he could fly. He jumped and he landed on the big tree in your backyard. It was a . . .” Maud closed her eyes to picture it. “It was a tree covered with yellow flowers. He broke some of the branches and died, and all of the flowers from then on were red, the same color as blood.”
Kate showed Sally how to pack the cup into her suitcase. “You can tell the story next time.” She lifted a pair of binoculars out of the suitcase and handed them to Sally, who lifted them to her eyes.
“We can use them next time we’re on the roof, to look a long way away,” Irma said.
Josh found a small pencil case, with drawings of rockets in a childish hand. “Don’t you remember?” Maud said. Most of the stories started that way. She led Josh to his own story. “Don’t you remember?”
He opened the case to find a pile of blunt colored pencils. “I made a map with these. A map of the Emporium.”
“Was it? But the blue is nearly gone. You drew a lot of sky. Or water.”
“Water,” he said. “I drew a map of the ocean, with lots of islands.” He looked around, as if trying to find the map. “We used to sail our boats to all the islands and spend a night on each one. The worst one was full of birds. They hated us camping. They were only quiet at night, and even then we heard them whispering.”
“That was probably ghosts,” Maud said. In the rare times when everything was quiet (air conditioner off, momentary music lull between cycles, everyone else asleep) whisperings could be heard.
Irma found a bag of jewelry and set it aside to check later and stack with her other finds. She knew she wouldn’t be able to take it all, but she wanted as many options as possible. She sat there in the semidark and felt a sense of loneliness drop over her. She craved adult company. She craved action and flirtation. She craved physical contact with an adult male.
She went back to where the children were and told Maud, “You know what? I think I’ll throw a party.”
They shifted dozens of clothing bags. Josh would go through them over the next few days. He had fifteen dress mannequins lined up (he was terrified of the day someone would put an order in for them) and he loved to dress them. He tipped out one of the bags, hoping for a treasure.
“Oh!” Maud said. She reached into the pile. “Look!” She lifted up a bright scarf, all purples and pinks, with pictures of flamingoes reflected on the water. “Have you seen another like this?”
“It must be Rachel’s!” Josh said. “Do you think she sent it to you somehow?” They both looked at the scarf, mystified, before Maud tied it around her neck.
“I love it so much,” she said, almost whispering in awe.
“Rachel sent us her things!” Kate said. They all decided that Rachel’s things returning to them was a message from her to them that everything would be okay. They decided she’d moved up in the world. She could unpack her suitcase and her backpack because she was staying in the same place for a while. They sometimes unpacked their suitcases but no one liked to be unprepared. They all wanted to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
They decided that Julian would send them a message too.
Sally found a packet of black markers. Squatting, she began to draw on herself, and Bean sat next to her to watch. “My dad had some like this,” Sally said.
“And the man, too,” Bean said. They called all of the delivery drivers “man.”
Sally covered her arms and legs with drawings of flowers. “I love them,” she said. The others all joined her, drawing on each other and themselves. Maud drew Julian flying, and also a picture of a cat, with little footprints left behind all up her arm.
Sally drew flowers on everybody. Irma said, “If you really love flowers, maybe you can look after our little flower tower on the roof? The birds love it.”
Sally shook her head, but Bean said, “It’s so cool! Can we both?” and Maud got them set up. Josh found them matching overalls, and Maud found them a small watering can each. They raided the florist, which had a small greenhouse filled with dead flowers and plants.
Irma said, “When I have my party, you girls can be in charge of getting me some flowers to put on the table!”
Chapter Eight
There was a lot to do. After sending out some invitations, Irma started her preparations.
It was past midnight. Music played: it never stopped. We play these parlor games. You say you love me. With most of the lights off, the atrium took on a silvery glow and in her fancy she saw fairies dancing in the corner and flying through the air, racing around as the children did by day.
She realized it wasn’t fairies at all but some of the older boys throwing balls around and other things as well.
With Julian gone, some of the boys thought they could step into his shoes, although Julian was never in charge, he was just calm and clever and helped to solve things. There were four or five of them, she thought, although it was hard to see in the low light. They’d all taken their shirts off and were circling each other. One brandished a baseball bat, another what looked like a mannequin arm. She would need to take control of them sooner rather than later, but she wasn’t sure how. And it was entrancing, watching them. How did they know this stuff? Was it instinctive, or did they have some memory of time outside the shopping center? Of adults in their lives taking part in this violent circling.
Then it was on, all five of them hitting and kicking, still quiet, somehow not disturbing the peace as much as they should.
They were agitated and at this stage only hurting each other, so she didn’t intervene, and they ran out of steam very quickly.
The next day, she gathered those boys together. She’d recognized one, and he quickly told her the names of the others. She took them up to the tower and filled them with junk food; chicken nuggets cooked in the microwave, cheese twists, potato chips, candy canes. She pointed out into the distance to the trees, and the pods hanging off them.
“Do you know what they are?” she said. “Any ideas?” None of them wanted to guess. “It’s people hanged. People like you, like any of you, hanged for violence. Remember the other day, when the driver came all bashed up?” They nodded, and she pointed out. “He’s hanging out there. The guy that did it to him. Hanging out there with all the others. There’s one main thing this society hates, boys. It’s violence. Battle it out with a game of some kind. Best for all involved.”
—
Irma was on a roll, feeding the children. She cooked up a big feast, more chicken nuggets, chips, some zucchini fritters she found stashed at the back of the freezer. She laid out nuts and energy bars. She fed them then asked them to help her clean up. “Let’s make a good impression. Let’s show these people how well we can look after our own place. Then they might leave everyone here.” She gave them all gloves and asked them to clear up the broken glass around the windows. So many broken windows, all the way up the tower. The gaps were covered with clear plastic in most places, so the light still got in, but it was less than perfect. “Be careful!” she told them. They threw some of the glass into the parking garage, but some of it they tossed out windows, in an attempt to deter visitors. Irma didn’t approve of that but they didn’t care.
Buckets sat over the floors, gathering drips of water. Another drowned mouse floated in one and the water in the others was discolored and smelled bad. Irma tipped them out herself. She wasn’t squeamish, after all her years working as a nurse.
—
After the cleanup, they were all exhausted. They sat up in their beds eating snacks, so tired they could barely manage even that. The lights were bright that day for some reason, so some of them made little tents over their beds. It was never completely dark in the shopping center. Maud wrote a letter to Julian and snuck out to mail it.
—
Preparing for the party was one of the best days any of them had ever had. They wanted to dress up (encouraged by Irma, who just wanted them not to annoy her) so they raided Cool Jewels and the formal wear shop. They all dressed in clothes too big for them; Josh tried to get them to change but no one would. The girls put gowns on over their other clothes, the boys, big jackets. They chose the most colorful jewelry. Irma noted none of it was of value. Most of that had gone. But the costume pieces were fun and who knew? Maybe they would be worth something. Certainly some of the pieces were rare.
“This is my mother’s handbag,” Carlo said. This seemed unlikely; it was a massive green thing Irma doubted anybody had ever used. “She used to carry my dad’s dinner in here when he worked . . .” He had to think. “When he worked on the buildings. He worked so hard he never stopped to eat so my mother would come with food for him. In here. You can see crumbs at the bottom.” He opened the bag wide for them to see and while there were no visible crumbs, all of them could imagine such. Everyone wanted handbags then, and that was fun too.
They showed Irma the makeup collection, and how they shaved off the lipsticks so they were as good as new. They tried on all the perfumes (some quite genuinely having memories of these scents) and they did their hair.
It seemed real when Maud said it.
Kate strapped them on. She clung to the walls and to the other children, grabbed onto the fake plants, held onto the backs of chairs, all the while laughing her head off.
“We have a few more pairs around somewhere,” Izzy said. “In the sporting goods store.” No one liked to venture there much. The smell of old rubber, leather and plastic, and the resulting smell of the metal, made it unpleasant. They told each other a team of footballers’ ghosts lived there, kids who died in a bus crash on the way to a match.
The sporting goods store was on the second floor, in a back corner. Irma hadn’t seen much of this area before and took it all in. There was a shoe shop, smelling like fresh leather, a delightful smell. A gift shop, mostly stripped, but with a few items left on the shelf. And “We buy gold.” She doubted there was anything left in there, but she’d check it out later.
“We’re still making lists of all this stuff,” Maud told her. “In case people want it.” The gift store had a fake fireplace, oddly, and a grandfather clock that was clearly made of carboard.
The sporting goods shop was a delight. It was still pretty well-stocked; people weren’t so keen on do it yourself sports these days. Thinking that she could convince some of the delivery drivers to stay for a bit if she entertained them (and in the back of her mind she was planning a party), she collected things that they could play with. She found a soft ball and bat set (Nerf Fun, it was called) and a game of quoits, and there was plenty more she could come back for.
The roller skates were piled in a corner, in a bit of a mess. “We keep adding them when we find them,” Maud said. “No one’s ordered any yet, but you watch, I bet they do now.”
There were enough pairs for all of those who’d followed along. Bean and Sally both cried; their feet were too small. But Maud, Izzy, Irma, Carlo, Josh and Marty all joined Kate. They wheeled around the shop, screeching with laughter, falling over, pulling themselves up, falling over again.
Then Marty rolled out the door of the shop. The passageway out the front was much more slippery, and he headed toward the stairs, much faster than he’d planned. He squealed, a high-pitched sound that had the others trying to race after him but falling over themselves. Irma tore her roller skates off and joined the chase, only to see him slip backward and land with a crack on the back of his head.
“Kate! Run down and get my bag! Maud! Takes his skates off.” Marty wasn’t responding. When she held his eyelids open, the whites of his eyes showed. All her old training kicked in. She’d done part of a medical degree before shifting to nursing; it was her nursing stuff that helped her here. She’d always been good at this. She’d just been sidetracked by life.
—
Irma felt more attached to the children after this. They changed in the way they looked at her; they trusted her now. They loved her, she thought, or at the very least admired her and were grateful to her. Marty had a headache and a massive bandage around his head, but he was apart from that okay. She stopped in at Young World to find gifts for them all, knowing in her heart they had all they needed. She found them clean socks, packets of handkerchiefs, scarves. She made a pot of spaghetti sauce with lots of hidden vegetables. They all ate it, although they made it clear they preferred Izzy’s cooking.
—
The delivery bell rang. Most of the drivers didn’t bother; they just left the stuff on the dock, or piled up outside the walls. So Irma knew it was her favorite, the one called Robbo. and who she rather liked. It had taken her a while to realize there were a few of them; they all looked quite similar. He was in the Children’s Services truck and by now she had realized it was the children providing the service rather than the other way around.
Everything was laid out on the deck. Garbage bags full, boxes, crates, and one white Styrofoam box, addressed to the Dead Letter Office.
Irma wanted to look in, but the driver stopped her. “Best not to know some things,” he said. He offered her a cigarette. She saw then that he’d clearly been in a fight. His face was bruised and two of his fingers bandaged. A partially healed cut split his cheek. Irma touched it gently.
“Some arsehole,” he said. “Jumped me out of the blue. They got him, though. He’s in the Factory, will be there for a while.”
They stood together, smoking. One of the children appeared in the doorway and Robbo tried to hide his cigarette, but Irma said, “They don’t care. It’s not like these kids’ll ask questions. I love them to bits, but it freaks me out a bit that they don’t ask any questions.
“Maybe they can’t see the point in knowing stuff. Maybe they’d rather not know.”
“But they talk about their parents; they just don’t know anything about them. They’re always talking about them being at work, without really knowing what that means.” She pointed to buildings in the distance. “Like, that’s where they are. Right? In the Factories. And they think being here is all about how old they are. Not about their parents and what they owe society.”
“Some people deserve to be in there,” he said. He took another drag of his cigarette and winced as if his cut lip gave him pain.
“Sooo?” she said.
“Misunderstanding,” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time, wrong assumption about what I was doing.”
Bean and Sally appeared beside them. “There you are!” Bean said. “Hiding!” Maud came up behind them.
“It’s all about keeping them safe, right?” Robbo said quietly.
Maud remembered something of life out there. The sense of a “lack of safety.” Whereas here she felt secure. Even with the younger boys battling it out to be “the boss,” with Julian gone, they were easily reminded of the other life, and of the importance of looking out for each other.
—
After Robbo left, Irma watched the children unpack. The Styrofoam box had gone straight to the post office. She’d look at that later.
They unpacked a box of out-of-date breakfast bars they had received in exchange for a crate of flattened drink cans. The bars were full of marshmallows and chocolate, and while the nutrition panel claimed they covered 5% of daily needs, they also covered 95% of salt and sugar limits.
The children loved them.
Irma felt sleepy and half-drunk. Watching them, she wondered if they understood what they were doing. She’d packed up her grandmother’s house and the contrast here, of these children unpacking a stranger’s belongings and claiming stories, was so very different she wondered if they saw the metaphor of unpacking a life, of naming items in order to own them.
Maud saw a shoebox, battered but intact, and claimed it. It was unlikely to hold actual shoes but you never knew. Mind you there were plenty upstairs in the shoe shop. A small percentage you had to match up, but most were already in pairs. Maud and Josh liked pairing the shoes with outfits. She said, “Josh! Maybe we’ll find an animal print pair in here to go with the coat you found!” It was a magnificent coat, soft, long, sleek. Josh had it hanging on a mannequin near the stage.
“I hope not,” Josh said, but he smiled.
Inside the shoebox was a teacup set, carefully wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. Cup, saucer, plate, not chipped, barely used, but very old.
“Oh, look!” Maud said. She turned the cup (cream, with a dark green stripe around the rim) over in her hands. She pretended to sip delicately from it. “This belonged to my grandmother. One day I went to visit her and we sat in the car and watched people play football and drank tea from these tea cups.” She thought for a moment. “I drank Milo, she drank tea. But then something happened to her and she dropped her tea onto her lap and burnt herself and died.”
Josh made a sad face, although he was clearly more focused on unpacking. Maud could picture the scene in her head but the memory seemed wrong, because of the light. Her brain kept shifting it to the Emporium but she knew she’d been outside once.
Carlo dug down into a pillowcase that had pictures of cartoon animals (a lion grooming his mane with an enormous comb, an elephant with loops of string tied around its toes, a leopard in running shoes). “Ooh, I found something for Sally.” It was a small metal cup, designed for a young child, with a big handle and the etching of a teddy bear.
“Here you go,” he said, handing it to Sally.
Sally stared blankly.
“It was a present from the people next door,” Maud said. She was the best at getting stories started. “They gave it to you when you turned one. It used to belong to their little boy but he died.”
“How?” Sally asked, entranced.
Maud held the cup. “Not poison,” she said. “It was a terrible accident. He was playing on the roof and fell off. He thought he could fly. He jumped and he landed on the big tree in your backyard. It was a . . .” Maud closed her eyes to picture it. “It was a tree covered with yellow flowers. He broke some of the branches and died, and all of the flowers from then on were red, the same color as blood.”
Kate showed Sally how to pack the cup into her suitcase. “You can tell the story next time.” She lifted a pair of binoculars out of the suitcase and handed them to Sally, who lifted them to her eyes.
“We can use them next time we’re on the roof, to look a long way away,” Irma said.
Josh found a small pencil case, with drawings of rockets in a childish hand. “Don’t you remember?” Maud said. Most of the stories started that way. She led Josh to his own story. “Don’t you remember?”
He opened the case to find a pile of blunt colored pencils. “I made a map with these. A map of the Emporium.”
“Was it? But the blue is nearly gone. You drew a lot of sky. Or water.”
“Water,” he said. “I drew a map of the ocean, with lots of islands.” He looked around, as if trying to find the map. “We used to sail our boats to all the islands and spend a night on each one. The worst one was full of birds. They hated us camping. They were only quiet at night, and even then we heard them whispering.”
“That was probably ghosts,” Maud said. In the rare times when everything was quiet (air conditioner off, momentary music lull between cycles, everyone else asleep) whisperings could be heard.
Irma found a bag of jewelry and set it aside to check later and stack with her other finds. She knew she wouldn’t be able to take it all, but she wanted as many options as possible. She sat there in the semidark and felt a sense of loneliness drop over her. She craved adult company. She craved action and flirtation. She craved physical contact with an adult male.
She went back to where the children were and told Maud, “You know what? I think I’ll throw a party.”
They shifted dozens of clothing bags. Josh would go through them over the next few days. He had fifteen dress mannequins lined up (he was terrified of the day someone would put an order in for them) and he loved to dress them. He tipped out one of the bags, hoping for a treasure.
“Oh!” Maud said. She reached into the pile. “Look!” She lifted up a bright scarf, all purples and pinks, with pictures of flamingoes reflected on the water. “Have you seen another like this?”
“It must be Rachel’s!” Josh said. “Do you think she sent it to you somehow?” They both looked at the scarf, mystified, before Maud tied it around her neck.
“I love it so much,” she said, almost whispering in awe.
“Rachel sent us her things!” Kate said. They all decided that Rachel’s things returning to them was a message from her to them that everything would be okay. They decided she’d moved up in the world. She could unpack her suitcase and her backpack because she was staying in the same place for a while. They sometimes unpacked their suitcases but no one liked to be unprepared. They all wanted to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
They decided that Julian would send them a message too.
Sally found a packet of black markers. Squatting, she began to draw on herself, and Bean sat next to her to watch. “My dad had some like this,” Sally said.
“And the man, too,” Bean said. They called all of the delivery drivers “man.”
Sally covered her arms and legs with drawings of flowers. “I love them,” she said. The others all joined her, drawing on each other and themselves. Maud drew Julian flying, and also a picture of a cat, with little footprints left behind all up her arm.
Sally drew flowers on everybody. Irma said, “If you really love flowers, maybe you can look after our little flower tower on the roof? The birds love it.”
Sally shook her head, but Bean said, “It’s so cool! Can we both?” and Maud got them set up. Josh found them matching overalls, and Maud found them a small watering can each. They raided the florist, which had a small greenhouse filled with dead flowers and plants.
Irma said, “When I have my party, you girls can be in charge of getting me some flowers to put on the table!”
Chapter Eight
There was a lot to do. After sending out some invitations, Irma started her preparations.
It was past midnight. Music played: it never stopped. We play these parlor games. You say you love me. With most of the lights off, the atrium took on a silvery glow and in her fancy she saw fairies dancing in the corner and flying through the air, racing around as the children did by day.
She realized it wasn’t fairies at all but some of the older boys throwing balls around and other things as well.
With Julian gone, some of the boys thought they could step into his shoes, although Julian was never in charge, he was just calm and clever and helped to solve things. There were four or five of them, she thought, although it was hard to see in the low light. They’d all taken their shirts off and were circling each other. One brandished a baseball bat, another what looked like a mannequin arm. She would need to take control of them sooner rather than later, but she wasn’t sure how. And it was entrancing, watching them. How did they know this stuff? Was it instinctive, or did they have some memory of time outside the shopping center? Of adults in their lives taking part in this violent circling.
Then it was on, all five of them hitting and kicking, still quiet, somehow not disturbing the peace as much as they should.
They were agitated and at this stage only hurting each other, so she didn’t intervene, and they ran out of steam very quickly.
The next day, she gathered those boys together. She’d recognized one, and he quickly told her the names of the others. She took them up to the tower and filled them with junk food; chicken nuggets cooked in the microwave, cheese twists, potato chips, candy canes. She pointed out into the distance to the trees, and the pods hanging off them.
“Do you know what they are?” she said. “Any ideas?” None of them wanted to guess. “It’s people hanged. People like you, like any of you, hanged for violence. Remember the other day, when the driver came all bashed up?” They nodded, and she pointed out. “He’s hanging out there. The guy that did it to him. Hanging out there with all the others. There’s one main thing this society hates, boys. It’s violence. Battle it out with a game of some kind. Best for all involved.”
—
Irma was on a roll, feeding the children. She cooked up a big feast, more chicken nuggets, chips, some zucchini fritters she found stashed at the back of the freezer. She laid out nuts and energy bars. She fed them then asked them to help her clean up. “Let’s make a good impression. Let’s show these people how well we can look after our own place. Then they might leave everyone here.” She gave them all gloves and asked them to clear up the broken glass around the windows. So many broken windows, all the way up the tower. The gaps were covered with clear plastic in most places, so the light still got in, but it was less than perfect. “Be careful!” she told them. They threw some of the glass into the parking garage, but some of it they tossed out windows, in an attempt to deter visitors. Irma didn’t approve of that but they didn’t care.
Buckets sat over the floors, gathering drips of water. Another drowned mouse floated in one and the water in the others was discolored and smelled bad. Irma tipped them out herself. She wasn’t squeamish, after all her years working as a nurse.
—
After the cleanup, they were all exhausted. They sat up in their beds eating snacks, so tired they could barely manage even that. The lights were bright that day for some reason, so some of them made little tents over their beds. It was never completely dark in the shopping center. Maud wrote a letter to Julian and snuck out to mail it.
—
Preparing for the party was one of the best days any of them had ever had. They wanted to dress up (encouraged by Irma, who just wanted them not to annoy her) so they raided Cool Jewels and the formal wear shop. They all dressed in clothes too big for them; Josh tried to get them to change but no one would. The girls put gowns on over their other clothes, the boys, big jackets. They chose the most colorful jewelry. Irma noted none of it was of value. Most of that had gone. But the costume pieces were fun and who knew? Maybe they would be worth something. Certainly some of the pieces were rare.
“This is my mother’s handbag,” Carlo said. This seemed unlikely; it was a massive green thing Irma doubted anybody had ever used. “She used to carry my dad’s dinner in here when he worked . . .” He had to think. “When he worked on the buildings. He worked so hard he never stopped to eat so my mother would come with food for him. In here. You can see crumbs at the bottom.” He opened the bag wide for them to see and while there were no visible crumbs, all of them could imagine such. Everyone wanted handbags then, and that was fun too.
They showed Irma the makeup collection, and how they shaved off the lipsticks so they were as good as new. They tried on all the perfumes (some quite genuinely having memories of these scents) and they did their hair.
