Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (12 page)

6

We found others like us, in due course. Early on, we came across a long-established band of them, but they'd become crazies, obeying the wishes of an absolute leader who'd set himself up as some kind of messiah, and they soon drove us off with shouts and fists. Eventually, though, we accrued a little band of our own. If the new person didn't have a name, Marlene bestowed one – some poor fool got stuck with "Lionel", and when he agreed to accept it she tossed a smug smile in my direction. Of course, there wasn't a whole lot for our group to do except talk incessantly, carry on the search for more people who'd retained their minds, and I guess be ready to offer defence in case the crazies came back our way again. Sometimes we engaged in half-hearted mock-sex games, but this was more frustrating than fun. If we had a leader it was Marlene, the giver of names, but I'm not sure any of us ever really thought that way. I was Marlene's sidekick in this nonexistent hierarchy: among other things, it was my job, along with a guy of roughly the same effective age as myself called Al, to step in and break up the occasional fight that threatened to break out among the others. Al was an easy-going sort of guy, which was a good thing: it meant we two peacemakers never argued between ourselves.

Twice we brought in newcomers from the sea, as we'd all at some stage been brought in, but both of the people we salvaged soon, despite our best efforts to keep them talking, became mindless – "deadies", as Marlene somewhat ruthlessly called them to distinguish them from ourselves. "Something in the air," said Marlene with resignation as we reluctantly abandoned the two we'd saved.

Aside from Marlene and Al and me, the ones I can recall in our band were Eileen (young and very pretty), Leonie (older than Marlene, but even prettier than Eileen), William (he laughed when Marlene gave him his name, because he came from the Gansiello Mountains region, somewhere in the Far Orient, apparently), Derek (an elderly man who liked to keep his emotional distance from the rest of us, frequently weeping over the wife he'd never see again), John, Barbara, Rita, Jefferson, Mike ... And then there were the children. I always felt a little sadness when I saw them, at the thought of the lives they'd not been allowed to lead. That didn't seem to concern Polly or Andrew much, though. Polly couldn't have been more than about eight. Andrew was in the early stages of adolescence, so perhaps there was a reason he showed few regrets about leaving his previous life. They were both luckier, of course, than the deady children we so often saw. To see a child's face completely robbed of animation ... It's not something you want to see as often as we did.

There were other people in our tribe, I know, and if I were there among them now I'd be able to reel off their names without difficulty, but ...

And then things changed.

I was walking on my own, trailing behind the others by a couple of hundred metres or so, taking a break from the constant banter – not that I disliked it, you understand: simply that from time to time I wanted to listen to my own thoughts, not other people's.

"Hey, you!" said a voice quite close by.

I started, looking around me. My first thought was that one of the others must have sneaked round behind me to play a prank.

"You!" said the voice, a little louder.

I was surrounded, as always, by a crowd of largely motionless deadies, as if I stood amid a fleshly version of one of the great megaliths of the warm world. I scanned their faces, but all were as vacant of expression as usual.

All except one, now that I scanned a second, more careful time.

She was sitting on the sand with her legs outstretched in front of her, her arms behind her as props to hold her torso erect. I'd walked right past her without even noticing her. The first impression I got, now, was of someone very fat, but I soon realized this wasn't the case at all: she was a
big
woman, constructed as if to a larger template than the standard for humanity. Her great head with its floss of grey curls was turned toward me, her lips drawn into a sly, conspiratorial smile, her eyes bright with alertness.

"What's your name?" she demanded.

"Joe." By now it had become completely mine.

"Same here."

I stared at her. "You're called 'Joe' too?"

"Without the 'e'. Short for 'Joanne'.
Not
'Joanna'. People often think my name's 'Joanna' and call me that. I
hate it
when people call me 'Joanna'. It's '
Joanne
' – got that, little man? But I prefer just being called 'Jo' anyway."

"Hello, Jo," I said stupidly. "I won't call you 'Joanna'."

"Good. You're a quick learner. Pleased to meet you."

"How long have you been here?" It was a question new encounters almost always asked each other within the first few seconds.

She grinned more broadly. "Who knows?"

It was the usual answer.

I smiled in response and squatted down in the sand beside her. Close up, I began to appreciate more fully quite how large she was. She had a cleft in her chin that would have seemed almost disfiguring on anyone else, but on her it was petite. Her breasts – there's little false physical modesty on the beach, because we're all so accustomed to nudity, and so I felt unembarrassed gazing at them in frank interest – were by far the biggest I'd ever been this near to, enormous by the standard of any other woman, and yet on that broad chest, between those great shoulders, they seemed if anything quite small, and they had the apple-like form of small breasts, too. She had a slight yeasty smell; smells, even bodily odours, were unusual on the beach, except for the omnipresent tang of brine. It was the breadth of her hips that had given me that initial impression of fatness; again, in proportion, they were perfectly normal. I guessed she was about the same age as Marlene, perhaps a little older.

"Seen enough?" she said after a while.

"You're ..." I began, waving a hand at her.

"Built to a generous scale," she filled in for me.

"Something like that."

"Or the rest of you are unusually small." She darted a significant glance at my genitals, dangling where I squatted.

I laughed. "Touché."

"I watched your friends go by," she continued.

"Why didn't you make yourself known to them?"

"Why should I?"

I shrugged. "Companionship?"

"It's a good idea to find out what your companions are like before you commit yourself," she observed.

It was something I hadn't thought of. At the beginning I'd always been so glad to make the acquaintance of someone new that there'd never been any room to have second thoughts. Later, I'd grown accustomed to the fact that strangers on the beach were pleased to discover each other. And yet there'd been that band of religious crazies, and one or two others whom we'd met since ...

"So," she said when she'd finished watching these thoughts drift through my mind, "I waited to pick out the straggler."

For a moment I was frightened of her. She could have crushed me easily by folding me in one of those hugely muscled arms.

"Don't worry, Joe. If I'd wanted to harm you I could have done it a dozen times by now. I just want to get to know you a bit, find out something about your friends – I assume they're your friends. You're not just dogging them, are you?"

"No. Not at all." I told her I'd just wanted a little peace, and then I described a few of these people who'd become so vitally important to me – the same people some of whose names I now can't remember. I spent more time talking about Marlene than the others, and Jo noticed this.

"She's special?"

"Yes. She was the first ... person I met after I'd got here. For a long time there were just the two of us, before we met Eileen, and then John. But I think Marlene would be special to me anyway. I just like her a lot. I guess it's lucky we didn't meet back in the ... in the real world. Here, love doesn't get in the way of things, or find itself gotten in the way of
by
things, the way it does there. We might have ended up having a wild May–September love affair and destroyed the friendship, the
real
love, we had. You know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes," she said. "It's easier when you can keep everything shallow."

I gaped at her. That wasn't the way I'd have thought of it.

"You ever told her how you feel about her?" said Jo.

I spread my hands. "There's no need to. She knows."

"Does she?"

"Well, yes."

Jo sucked her lips, stared at the hated sea. I began counting the breakers, a habit all of us had when there was nothing at all else to think about. There were twelve of them before she spoke again.

"Ever wondered why you all speak the same language? Me too?"

I hadn't. I said so.

"Why not?" she said.

It hadn't ever struck me as being curious. It had just seemed ... natural. I told her that, too.

There was another pause, this time for fourteen breakers.

"Remember," she asked me at last, "I said I wanted to sus you people out before committing myself to joining you?"

"Yes."

"I meant it. I'm not interested in becoming a part of your merry little tribe if it's just to have my ears filled with small-talk. I can do without small-talk – if I'm desperate, I can always talk to myself, and I sometimes do. No, what I'm wondering is if you people are worth my fellowship. It sounds to me as if, somewhere along the line, you've forgotten that notion of commitment."

"If you mean are we loyal to each other, then ..."

"What a quaint term, 'loyal'. It's good to hear it from someone your age. It gives me hope." Her smile this time was slow and reflective, as if she were remembering something, some
one
, from long ago. "But I was meaning more than just dutiful loyalty."

"We accept each other for what we are."

"Better."

I was at a loss for words. On the beach, where there was so little else, what we were to each other was our entire world. I attempted to explain this, but I knew the explanation was clumsy.

"Would you kill for each other?" Jo said. "Die for each other?"

I let out a bark of laughter, and shoved myself to my feet, holding out a hand to help her up. God knows what would have happened had she taken it. She had to have a mass at least twice mine. "Kill?" I said bitterly. "Die? How could we kill or die
here
, where we're all dead already."

A strange look crossed her face as she clambered upright, but I lost sight of it as this giantess began towering over me. Jo started to say something, then said instead, "It's not whether you
can
do either of these things. It's whether you
would
."

"Then I guess yes, we would."

"But you're not prepared to tell Marlene you love her?"

"She's the one I'd be readiest to die for."

"Interesting." She put a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Come on. Introduce me to your friends, little fellow."