Nona the Ninth, page 9
“People with no eyes,” said Honesty.
Born in the Morning said unsteadily, “He was bullshitting you.”
Honesty ignored him. He said, “Said the eyes was all white. But he said he was moving quietly, real quietly, and these guys—they’re all just sitting around—they all look up … they all look at him … with these white-out eyes … they all look up at the same time. They look at him. He kept saying that,” he said suddenly, breaking off. He said, “Kept saying, they saw me, they saw me, oh my God.”
His voice took on a more normal cast and he said, “Then he said that someone in the van behind started taking potshots at him so he called for pickup. The boss was all, calm down, calm down. But then … then the driver said we were being followed … and the guy goes crazy sobbing and apologising, saying he fucked up, he got us in trouble, and then one of the old chicks is like, get the kid out, and … and they stop the car and there’s another two big trucks pulling up behind us, militia trucks with guys, and…”
For a moment Honesty couldn’t talk. They all sat there together and breathed as one, Nona matching her breath to Hot Sauce matching her breath to Honesty and Beautiful Ruby and Born in the Morning and even Kevin, all in one tight and sweating circle.
Then in a completely normal and even brassy voice, Honesty said, “Then I ran like fuck and I bonked my head on a pole so bad I probably got brain damage, so you have to all be very nice to me.”
The whole group absorbed this. Nona reached down for one of the empty sprays and chewed at the ends, wanting something to chew on, if not to eat, liking the way the tough fibrous stem felt between her teeth.
Then Born in the Morning said, “You just said like forty-two swears.”
“Oh my God, man, shut up,” said Honesty.
“It’s not fair if I swear and get in trouble with Nona and Honesty doesn’t,” said Born in the Morning.
“Shut up, Born in the Morning,” said Kevin.
And because Kevin never told anyone to shut up, Born in the Morning shut up. But that was okay—that broke the atmosphere. Hot Sauce kept her hand on Honesty’s shoulder and said, “You think they’re following you?” and Honesty said, “Nah. Nah,” and then: “I’m your boy, right, Hot Sauce? I’m your best boy?”
“Yes,” said Hot Sauce gently, “you’re my boy. I’ll take care of you.”
Then there was the main teacher standing over them, and they looked up guiltily from their huddle, but she was only smiling at them in the way teachers did when they thought they knew what was going on and didn’t really.
“Group meeting, is it?” she said, kindly. “Honesty, here’s one of the shelter pamphlets, okay?”
Honesty was so affrighted that he just said, “Yes, miss, thank you, miss,” and took it.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “Clean up, everyone, it’s nearly class time. Nona, could you ring the bell? Then you’d better leash up Noodle. I want to mark some books.”
Nona jumped up immediately. “Yes, of course.”
But she didn’t go right away. She went back down into a crouch as the rest of them picked up fragments of stem and crushed berry from the floor—not so many crushed berries, they weren’t stupid—and she volunteered, “I’ll take care of you too, Honesty.”
“Who wants you to take care of me?” said Honesty cheerfully, getting to his feet. “You’re dumb as a box of hair, Nona.”
Nona was indignant, but Hot Sauce said, “How many vehicles?”
“I dunno,” said Honesty. “I wasn’t counting the whole way and the guy picked the middle one, middle-ish. Over ten. Could’ve been twenty. Megatrucks, all of ’em. I tell you what,” he said, and he brushed his trousers off, and he said heavily: “I know what it was. I hang out with you lot. I know the deal. Nobody ever asks poor old Honesty … Honesty could’ve told him not to try and knock off the goddamned Convoy.”
8
HOT SAUCE APPROACHED NONA before the Hour of Science and said, “You’re still on lookout.”
What with all the fuss about Honesty it had completely escaped Nona’s mind that someone was watching, or that Hot Sauce was investigating. But that was Hot Sauce for you; Hot Sauce never forgot.
Nona said, keeping a weather eye on the Angel, chatting to some of the smaller kids as she got out a bucket of ice cubes and socks (they were finishing off a unit on temperature): “She still looks tired.”
“Yes.”
“I should make her a coffee,” Nona said decisively. “I’m a Teacher’s Aide, I need to look after the teachers too.” And: “Did you know she was a doctor?”
“Yes,” said Hot Sauce, without explaining. And: “When you’re out there today, I want you to pretend to do something.”
“Okay. What?”
“I want you to pretend you’ve got a radio,” said Hot Sauce, “and you’re making a call.”
As Nona had never used a radio nor made a call in her life, she said dubiously, “It’s not going to be very good. There’s nothing out there shaped like a radio so it’ll have to be a pretend radio, and I’m not like Honesty, I can’t do mime or anything.”
Hot Sauce tapped her foot impatiently, her gaze still outside the window for some reason.
“Pretend it’s small. Hand sized.”
“What do I say?”
“Make something up. But hide your mouth.”
When the Angel approached with Noodle’s leash in one hand and what looked to be six weird little cups in the other, she said, “Don’t stay out in the sunshine any more than you have to. He’ll want to walk, so can you put his pattens on? My old man doesn’t need burns on his feet. Noodle’s used to the shoes, but tell him to stop if you see him chew his feet and he’ll stop. I’d keep him inside, except we’ll be using the hair dryer today and he always cringes at the sound. Thanks, Nona, you are my hero. Hot Sauce, can you set up the stations?”
Nona left the Hour of Science behind her and went down the stairs. She checked to make sure the light above the door was still red, which was one of her jobs, as the nice lady teacher always warned her that people would try to come in if the door was unlocked, and they probably wouldn’t be dangerous but if they had another teaching building get taken over by squatters she simply had no idea where they’d go after that. Then Nona tried to put the shoes on Noodle. It was by far the most difficult thing she had ever attempted. It would have been easier to do the weird bone things that Camilla and Palamedes loved her to attempt. Noodle didn’t want to have his pattens put on. He kept staring at Nona over his shoulder every time she wrestled a tiny, dirty white foot into a patten—it was like a little sock over a plastic grate—and there were six of them, she even had to do the legs he often stuck up or folded in at the middle. At one point, Noodle cunningly wriggled his way out of one shoe using another foot and Nona could have shrieked. She said, “Noodle, how dare you?” and he didn’t look guilty at all.
When the pattens were on, he clattered out into the courtyard. He sounded like one and a half horses. He bucketed disconsolately around, smelling things, doing his business, and then drinking from the bowl of chilled water that Nona poured for him. Then he politely clattered away to lie under the big stone seat in the shade, panting.
Nona ambled around the dusty courtyard for a bit herself until she simply felt too hot to live. The heat and the sweat were making her feel faint. She squatted in the shadows close to Noodle’s seat and listened to him breathe, and then she tried to pretend she was taking a very tiny radio out of her pocket. She cupped her hand to one ear, and she walked out into the sunshine, because she loved Hot Sauce and wanted to do it right. The heat made the backs of her knees panic.
“Hello, hello,” she said into her hand. “I am having a conversation with Crown.” Nona remembered that she was meant to be covering her mouth, and did so. She said aloud, “How are you, Crown? Things are fine over here. I wish you were around more. You haven’t come to see me outside of meetings for months and months. I know you said you visited me before, but I was too young and I can’t remember it so it doesn’t really count. Would you like to come to my birthday party on the beach? If I don’t get really mad it’ll probably still be able to happen. You don’t have to bring me a present, but please wear your hair down. Anyway, I love you, so, bye.”
This was as much conversation as she could think up. She pocketed the fake radio and took her hand away from her mouth, then she settled down on the bench in the shade to think. The smoke had cleared and so the air outside wasn’t making her cough, and there were little insects haunting the nearby dead-brown bushes, murmuring busily. There was no bird song, but every so often there was the nice comfortable noise of a car backfiring. Nona put one foot down on the ground to anchor herself, and worked the other foot out of her shoe, and only felt slightly guilty that she was allowed to do such a thing and Noodle wasn’t. It was so hot, and her eyelids felt very heavy, and the stone beneath her was very cool.
JOHN 15:23
HE SAID: ON THE FIRST DAY A— BELIEVED. On the second day so did M— and G—. By the third day everyone believed, because of my eyes.
He coughed wetly and, once he had recovered, said: A girl in my high school once told me I had pretty eyes. I was puffed up over that until I was like thirty. You wouldn’t believe how stupid guys get over compliments on our looks, I was vain as. But my eyes weren’t anything special—light brown, not even hazel, yellow on a sunny day. The morning after the lights went out they lightened to dark amber, then they went the colour of new lager, and on the third day they were gold.
P— said I looked like a Māori TV Pink Panther. C— said I looked like Edward Cullen from that old Twilight movie, if Edward Cullen had the body of a history teacher. A— said I looked cool. He was the only one.
He said, And all around us, those corpses refused to rot.
In the dream, they were hiking up a big hill of brown, sun-blasted grass, crunching like paper beneath their feet. Below them the waters were rising, but they ascended without hurry, unpanicked by that bubbling, churning, brown morass: those stupefying eddies frilled around the edges with trash of all kinds—broken trees and big sheets of steel; bobbing, groaning constructions of tires and frames that he had pointed out as cars. He had spent some time pointing at things that were being claimed by the water, though she felt less that she was being taught their names and more that he was naming them for himself. Someone’s Honda. Someone’s Mazda. Someone’s four-wheel drive. Someone’s shed. A Macca’s sign. The rain would turn on and off. The clouds were strange, and in the far distance, a twister danced on the neon surface of the sea.
They found a bench to sit on, though they didn’t need to catch their breath. It was warm despite the rain, and the air around them was moist and prickly. It made the skin on her ribs sweat. And he said, “There it all goes again. I can’t stand it,” and for a long time he cried, unashamed.
Once that squall had passed, he said: In the beginning we moved those corpses all over the place … M— was so frantic to prove something in the science had gone wrong, or right. I think she thought if we’d achieved some scientific breakthrough, I’d get a job again and everything would go back to normal and we’d keep doing cappuccino Tuesdays. We picked two of them—two people, different sexes, different deaths, one got their neck snapped in a car accident and the other was smoke inhalation. Same age though, for control; they were born twenty days apart. Then we played dolls with those two kids for a week.
He said, They wanted to see if we could make them rot. We left them in the boiler room. Left them in the morgue. Left them outside overnight, exposed, all over dew in the morning. Nothing changed. Their internal temperature stayed regular the whole time. It wouldn’t change even with A— and C— holding hair dryers over their damn bodies or us wrapping them in solar blankets and putting them in the sun. Poor C—. You should’ve seen her heave every time we unwrapped the blanket. She was a good sport about it, but it wasn’t in her remit. Contract law doesn’t set you up for rolling a couple bodies into a pond.
He said, But she didn’t need to worry about it. They didn’t change. Not one thing about them changed. They were perfect. All those corpses were perfect.
He said: I’d been sleeping in the facility already. I refused to go home. A— and M— moved in with me, and G— set up outside; he was sleeping in his ute. C— was staying with N—, long days. She left us early in the morning and came back the next day with sausage rolls for breakfast. I didn’t realise it at the time but she’d already gone AWOL from the stakeholders. She was doing freelance for us: so translated, she was unemployed. But she was the reason we could even stay in the building. She’d massaged all the contracts and told the cops we needed to be in there to make sure disposal and records were handled properly, which gave us a grace period of a whole month. How we got through that I’ll never know. I don’t know if we would’ve got away with it if we hadn’t had our pet cop. And if the whole world hadn’t been freaking out every time you did something unexpected and people thought you were going to kick the bucket early. Nobody was looking at us back then, and we got lucky. It worked.
He said, more to himself: Fuck, it was a weird time. I wasn’t eating much. I only wanted to be with my bodies, like if I took my eyes off them the magic’d stop. I started knowing what room they’d been stashed in even if no one told me. C— said it was psychological clues in their body language, but I wasn’t convinced. I could feel them—I could feel everyone in the building—it was like having the lights turned off. You hear all the sounds outside. You hear all the cicadas in the grass, you hear the dogs in the next town over barking. You hear the moreporks in the trees and the possums skittering over shed roofs. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been able to hear them before, but I couldn’t separate the noises. Like hearing a chord without knowing what notes go into it.
He said, A— was trying so hard to bring me back down to earth, trying to get me to pay attention to the outside world. He’d swapped with M—. She’d stopped freaking out, she didn’t ask me where my pills or the drink was anymore. She just took notes, helped with all the trials I wanted to do, squabbled with A—. At least that made me feel normal. That was their usual double act. It was only when they felt the same thing that I knew it was serious.
He said, I just wanted to be in the lab. It felt like I could sit by those two bodies, those two kids, and make time go away. I could sit next to them for six minutes, I could sit next to them for six hours. Just listening. They were my moreporks and possums. I was hearing their bodies in all that silence, all the bacteria that weren’t growing … what wasn’t building up in the gut, what wasn’t pooling at the joints. They were my silent night. I should have been doing paperwork and closing reports, but I hadn’t opened the computer in days. I couldn’t stop thinking about their palms, their hands. I touched their hands so often. I’d touched their hands before, but not like this. Even when I wasn’t touching them I could feel their skin on my skin, that temperature that wouldn’t change. I kept thinking I was touching them when I wasn’t. M— said I should probably get tossed in a rubber room, but she wasn’t scared I was nuts. She was scared I wasn’t.
He said, You know, I can’t even remember how it came together now. There was no catalyst, no revelation. I was too far gone for revelations. It was like I’d been dozy and now I was waking up. So, my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U— and T— on their certificates, you know, their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted. My two kids with their frozen brains and their perfect internal temperatures. There wasn’t a place on the poor bastards I hadn’t breached with a thermometer, and now I was knocking before I came into their room. Yeah, I was nuts. But I was waking up.
He said, I can’t remember how or why I brought M— and A— into the room. I was like, Hey you two, I want you to meet someone. I wasn’t trying to be a dick. I think I hadn’t slept for two days.
So I brought them into the room with the bodies and I was all, Let me introduce you to … Ulysses. Let me introduce you to … Titania.
He thought about it and added, I better say that it was Titania from Midsummer, Shakespeare, but Ulysses was for a dog my nana had when I was a child. I worshipped that dog. He was the bravest dog I’d ever met. Half Chihuahua, half pug. Nan called him Ulysses S. Grunt. Died from eating too much pizza. The dog, I mean. Nan died of pneumonia when I was a teenager.
She said: “But what about the bodies?”
He said, Well. When I said, Ulysses, I moved each of his fingers and his thumb into a fist, curled them into the palm. And when I said, This is Titania, same thing, I placed each of her fingers and her thumb into a fist.
And I was laughing and laughing like I’d kicked out a chair before someone sat down. Like, good joke. But M— threw up.
“Because, Harrow, I’d done it from the other side of the room.”
9
NONA JOLTED AWAKE with a start when she felt a tender slobbering on her ankle. It was Noodle’s terrible licky tongue investigating the bit where the bone of her foot made a bump, which he obviously thought was a friendly gesture. She could have only been asleep for a little while—the sun hadn’t moved and the big hot blue shadows of the courtyard were shimmering in the same position they always had—but she startled herself upright anyway, freaking out that she had snored away most of the Hour of Science without taking care of Noodle or even looking for whoever was watching the building. She checked Noodle to make sure his pattens were on, retrieved the bowl and the bottle, and took the dog inside.
She was very relieved to hear the Angel’s voice coming through the door and floating down the stairs, explaining why the ice cube in the sock had melted more slowly than the ice cube not in the sock. She sat down on the stairs and began assisting Noodle out of his pattens. Nona had assumed Noodle would be grateful, but he still turned around and showed her the whites of his eyes despite the fact that she was now taking him out of the pattens rather than putting them on, and he wriggled. The cloakroom door opened and out came Hot Sauce.
