Ectopia (4 page)

0.06

10am

Once a month. It's worse than her period.

Karen's Day Out.

Dad's been outside since sunrise. He's gone haywire. It used to be enough to stand on his ladder and peer over the fence till her bus was out of sight. Not now. He's been sawing all morning. Soon he'll be hammering. Some new structure's set to rise out of his dust garden.

 

Mom's singing. It's like she gets to stick her own beak out between the bars on Karen's day out. She flutters her stubby wings, clocks the sky, and opens her throat.

We put up with it. Singing stops her eating for a while.

She makes the songs up as she goes along. These songs aren't German like she used to sing. Some people sang to make people laugh, she says. Joke songs. She leaks tears when she sings though coz people don't laugh any more. She says she sings coz someone has to. The show's not over till the fat lady sings.

I'm married to a fascist
My kids have gone berserk
Being a Mom this day and age
Is a funny kind of work

The melody's bouncy. It's hard to tell her mood from her face coz you can't read the emotions of a balloon, but I'd guess she's bitter. The song's got more bite than smile.

It used to be a love thing
All gooey eyed and sweet
But far from mother's milk my babes
Sucked toxins from the teat

Now no-one changes diapers
We live in our own shit
Survival of the meanest
Is the new holy writ

 

- What'll I wear? Karen asks.

Asking Mom, who's so big she wears drapes. Mom's good though. Her eyes are sharp. The thread quivers between the fat of her fingers but she always slips it through the needle. Then she flattens the fabric under her palms and shifts it round the machine. She doesn't measure. She doesn't draw. She just cuts and sews. It's like the size and shape of Karen is locked inside her head somewhere. Paul and Dad and me could go naked for all she cares. She only makes clothes for Karen. It's all that interests her.

This outfit she's made is simple. Mom's taken two different strips of government issue material, some lightweight synthetic mix, one strip olive green and the other orange. She's cut em into four triangles, two of each color. The orange ones hang front and back from Karen's waist, pointing down. The two olive triangles are attached by points to an orange choker round her neck, her shoulders bare but with one triangle broadening out across her back and the other across her breasts, their remaining points sewn together at her sides.

The outfit suits her. It frees her legs to stride out, and lets air pass around her midriff. I see her modeling it for herself. I'm meant to see. She's left her bedroom door open, knowing she's safe indoors from Dad for a while so long as she can hear him banging around in the garden. She strikes poses in the mirror, clasping her hands behind her head and arching back her body so that her new top rides up a little and exposes the lower rim of the globes of her breasts.

- Why do you bother? It's just girls you're meeting. Why get dressed up for that?

She turns to face me, stares, straightens her top out by flattening her hands across her breasts, but she doesn't answer.

- It's sad. You get all dressed up. You go out. You girls look at each other. Then you all come home again.

- You're sad, she says.

Wit fails her sometimes. Her days out don't do her any good. They give her something to hope for then phut, it's gone. She knows it and it makes her vulnerable. She goes on the defensive. Oh well. She's not at her sharpest but at least I've got her talking.

- What have you got planned? I ask her.

- What's it to you?

- You're going swimming.

- How did you know that?

- In a pool. A blue swimming pool with pink inflatable animals bobbing around on its surface. Some of you will be naked, others in T-shirts.

- You don't know that. You can't see into my future.

- You'll splash and be silly for twenty minutes. For the next fifteen minutes you'll gather in rows in the shallow end and follow an aquarobics program on vidscreen. Then for ninety minutes you have free choice. You can swim lengths, drink soda and chat under the shade of four artificial trees, or sunbathe. After that you'll get on the bus and come home.

- You can't know that. Only us girls know that.

- You get three options for your days out. One is a hike up and down the same hill. Another is team games on a field. The third is swimming. You have to do each of em at least once a year. You've hiked your hill, and you've played your games. Now you girls have the vote, you'll choose swimming. It's always the same.

- You don't know that.

- It'll all be confirmed tomorrow. Cameras are fitted to the sides of the vidscreen at teensquad. The day after the girls' day out, your nude aquarobics sessions are broadcast. We use em as a team-building exercise. We watch and we laugh and we jerk off.

- That's a lie, Steven.

- You know it's not. Why else would the state go to the trouble and expense of herding you together and getting you naked? They sell rights to their nude bathing films all around the world. They trade em for tropical fruits.

- It's a lie, Steven. We're not going swimming. We never go swimming.

- But you told me…

- I lied.

The horn of a bus blared from outside.

- Do you think I'd tell you what we girls do, what we girls talk about? Do you think your tiny prick-focused brain could even begin to think wide enough to imagine your way into a girl's being? Out of my way, pussy breath. I've got to go. We girls have got a revolution to plan.

I guess I was wrong. Karen never was the vulnerable type.

 

The windows on the bus are all blackened. Women with automatics take up six of the double seats inside, they say. The bus is flanked by eight riders, all of em soldiers, young males hidden under polaroid visors. They're trigger happy, they say. They shoot to kill. For each death on the road, the riders are granted girl privileges. So they say.

That's a shitline. No-one believes it.

No-one's ever fucked with a girlbus either. Some things, like white hot steel and nuclear fallout, you just know not to touch.

- So long, Dad says. He's up his ladder near the fence, set far enough back from the path so Karen isn't tempted to kick it as she passes. He's building a scaffold but it's not firm enough to stand on yet. He speaks soft and stares down. He likes looking at Karen from unconventional angles, hoping for an extra glimpse of flesh.

This new top must disappoint him. It offers no cleavage.

Karen doesn't look at him. A sigh hisses past her teeth, and she smashes the bolts on the front gate with the heel of her hand to free em.

I follow Karen to the girlbus door. I'm meant to be her escort, it's a legal thing when a girl has to step onto a street, but she prefers to use me as her wake. The bus door wheezes open. A whiff like lavender growing through tar steams out, the latest girlscent. Then the door sucks Karen inside and the bus eases off.

Dad's head's looking out from over the fence. He watches the girlbus till it's out of sight. His forehead crinkles up.

- It's a violation, he says - Taking a girl from her home like that. Tempting her with things beyond her grasp.

I know Karen. She's my twin. Day by day we put up with the bastard. Getting out of Dad's grasp once a month, that's what she lives for.

It's something.

Not enough, but it's something.

6.05pm

Karen's come back on schedule.

Dad grabs her as I follow her through the gate. He holds on to her right arm, his fingers digging into the bare flesh, and scans her with his eyes. Checking for damaged goods.

She flushes as red as her hair.

- Mom, she yells.

Mom's not fast, but she swells out the door like a gathering storm and Dad backs off. Karen folds herself into the flesh of Mom's sides.

- I'll put food on the step, Mom says to Dad and me – You can stick in the garden till the sun's down. It's our day. It's the girls' day, the women's day. The house is ours. Stay out.

Paul's inside. Goggles on, phones clamped round his head, he's in another world. He's not worth bothering about. They leave him there, romping the corridors of genebank.

They think him innocent.

He's as innocent as the fetus antichrist floating in a womb.

 

I lift planks up to Dad. He reaches down, his new scaffold's that high already.

- You run the streets, he explains when I ask what he's up to – Don't think no-one sees. I've got my eye on you, Steven. You and that scum you call mates.

- You can't see round corners, I tell him.

- That gang of yours, you're all pups, he says – You run about the streets, pissing and yapping. You think it's fun, but it's mindless. Soon you'll be dogs. Young dogs sniffing out the scent of bitch on heat. I'm an old dog. I know where you'll all be running to then. Don't think I don't know it. And I'll be ready. I'll be ready for you.

He looks up at Karen's window, checking her out. She's not there so he reaches down for another plank. He's building high so as to see over the loops of razor wire that decorate the top of his fence. Kids have treehouses. Dad's grown up. He's building himself a control tower.

Great. Home's a concentration camp. Dad's the madman at the gates.

One more day in the construction of hell.

0.07

9.48am

The family that eats together, stays together, Mom says.

It sounds like a curse. It's enough to set us all fasting.

She sings Jesus wants me for a sunbeam while whisking up stacks of pancakes. It's her Sunday tradition. The pancakes are like leather. It's as close as we come to eating meat in the house.

Dad's chosen the topic for the day's forced conversation. Every scientist in every country all over the world is working out why no more female animals are born. It's all that science does, and they're getting nowhere. Dad's decided to do em all a favor. He reckons we can crack the problem over a family breakfast.

- It's the heat, Dad says, sitting down at the kitchen table.

He jumps round newstext on TV when he's not building his defenses or running his futures, and reads the daily science forecasts. He plays his pet theory.

- Global warming. It's the heat that does it. Every damn fool knows that. Alligator eggs don't start off sexed. They heat up, they turn male. They cool down, they turn female. It's the same with the goddam world.

He's got two fridges and a freezer stacked in the cellar, and enough fuel to run a generator through the electric lapses over nine months. He plans to isolate Karen in a chillroom once her eggs are fertilized and then keep her that way. At least that's my guess of his plans when I warp through the slush in that fucked-up mind of his.

- It's the spermcount, Karen counters. She doesn't want to be chilled. She's passing the buck. It's a girlpower thing, saying girls have got the power even though they're obsolete, and men are fuckups even though they swarm the planet. The logic's warped but she's got a point – Men's spermcount's low. They don't pump it out like they used to. The game's all over before the sperm even reaches the egg.

- You never had an egg, Paul, Mom says. Her newstext settings only deliver food items – Common as muck in boxes of twelve they used to be. I made pancakes so light you could chew em with your tongue. They've cloned some hens, they say. Not breeders, but layers. You'll get to eat an egg before I die, Paul. That's my hope. I'm going to start saving.

Paul takes his turn. No-one gets to leave the Sunday table till we've all said something.

- A boy I'm schooled with, we share the same surftime, his Dad saw a pike, he says.

- He still goes fishing? Dad asks.

- He sits by the river where he used to fish. Next time though he's taking his tackle. That pike'll need a few tricks to see the week out. Everyone's onto it now.

- It's a rumor, Dad says - That pike story comes up in my chatrooms every other month.

- You know the thing about rumors? Karen says – They can be true. It's not just low spermcounts. Men's erectile potential is down. I read a survey. It seems images that got men going now leave em flaccid.

- You're obsessed, I tell her – All you can think about is dick.

- Look who's talking, she answers back – If I choose to get pregnant, I'll leave it to science. At least their inserts don't go limp.

We chew on the pancakes while everyone waits. It's my turn to say something constructive. Slagging off Karen won't do. This ordeal won't end till I've said something related to Dad's chosen topic.

- I saw a sparrow yesterday, I lie.

Sparrows are childhood memories.

- Liar, Karen says – That's a lie. It doesn't count. Tell us something real. Tell us why your shoes were covered in blood when you got back yesterday.

- I heard it singing. In a garden. I climbed onto a wall and there it was. In a tree.

- Liar, Karen says - Birds sing before mating. There's nothing to mate with.

- Not so, Paul says.

I look at him. He's not helping me out. Not consciously. He just loves showing off, knowing more than we do.

- Sparrows can live forty-five years. It's not seventeen years since the last female birds were born, so go figure. Owls, they live eighty years.

I've said my piece. No need to add that every bird got blasted out of the sky years ago. Paul's a cipher. He'll never get a grip on the ways of the world.

- He sees the meanest sparrow fall, Mom adds – Jesus does.

That's the Sunday moment we've been waiting for.

Leaving halfeaten pancakes on our plates, we push back our chairs and stand up.

Mom stays sitting, tears running down her cheeks. The cheeks are smiling somewhere deep beneath their discs of fat. I bet they are. She looks forward to these Sunday mornings. They're what get her through the week.

 

Dad goes down his cellar. Mom won't have him crashing round the garden on Sunday mornings, building his traps and his barricades. On a Sunday he can leave our defenses to the Lord.

He shuts the cellar door to mute his sawing and his hammering. Officially he's at work when he's down there, but that just means looking up occasionally and triggering a few moves on a keyboard. He's got his own screen scrolling numbers all the time. From being a lumber man he switched to trading virtual wood. It's called trading in futures. Trading in futures is like dinosaurs trading in evolution. We've got no futures but people still pay for em. People as dinobrained as Dad. They trade saplings before they sprout. They trade acorns and fir cones in bulk. They trade forests as they die, so they can harvest the prime moment between death and rotting.

Dad says he's good at it because he knows trees.

He doesn't know trees. He knows killing trees.

He says it's the same thing. He's making a killing. Where do I think our family credits come from? Do the scum I run around with eat the quality we do? You don't get brand names on food cans for nothing. You don't even get labels. He's tracking a consignment of corned beef as we speak. It's just about the last supply of edible meatstuff in the public domain. It'll cost him an acre of Brazil if he gets it, and he's talking a can not a carton.

He can stuff his corned beef. I'd sooner chew bark than be grateful.

 

8.30pm

Sundays are a day of breast. That's a joke. Jokes made people laugh when people still laughed. We don't laugh now but we snort sometimes.

They say dreks hang out in churchyards on Sundays. They lean themselves against gravestones and drink and drink till they pass out in the shadow of stone. We're on different details so we don't seek em out. Slicing dreks belongs to weekdays. Sundays are for personal community service. On Sundays we round up women.

That's the joke. The day of breast joke. It's the day we round up women,

Rounding up women is hard work. We use a special reinforced cart. Fold down steps lead up to a platform surrounded by iron bars. The cart has solid rubber wheels. Families call in when one of their women goes missing and we wheel our cart to the neighborhood. It's semi-official business. It keeps us busy. Every teensquad has an undertow community quota to fulfill.

- She's big, they say in the official reports they log when one goes missing – A big woman. Vast. Legs like trees. Face like a beachball. Answers to the name of Mom.

One description fits all.

In their own homes these women make some kind of sense. Out on the streets all they want to do is talk. They stare and they talk. Their brains migrate to some distant past when bodies were normal and life went on.

– Up you go, we tell em, and steer em into the carts.

They stare through the bars and often sing as we steer em through the streets, not made-up songs like Mom's but songs they used to dance to when they were young enough and slight enough to see their feet. One of us guides the front and at least three of us push from the rear.

Malik conducts the inquo as we move. He puts obvious questions, ones such women are used to. Address? How many kids? What ages and sexes? Who's at home?

He taps the answers into his pad. If answers match a map comes up, the woman's house marked in red. Click on it and the family details come up on screen. We arrive, let her out the cart, see how she gains entry to her home, log that in, and off we go.

We had lousy luck today. We found us a whalewoman wrapped in light blue sheets. She gave her address in a high girlie voice. Malik tapped it in, and did a search. He had to flip back decades. The street she says she lives in burnt down thirty years ago.

She's a regress.

It meant the long haul to the pound. It's five years since dogs were there and they've put beds in the cages to make it homely. I doubt the blue sheet woman is reclaimable. No credible family would certify her useful. She'll be hauled off to the stacks inside a week.

We get a merit blip for the find. It brings our teensquad up to 28
th
in the city league. None of us gives a shit.

At the end of the details we drop the uniforms to the floor, get into our own kit, and go home.

 

That's it. The seventh day of my first week as scribe. I'll sleep, wake up, and it's Monday again.

What a crap prospect.