The Seventh Day (17 page)

For three days I return to that small room, and each time I carry lengths of wood, which I lay upon the floor for strength, and each day I go there, I stand longer at that door, straining to see, to hear the past, to know that which has gone before. I touch nothing. It is as if I fear to disturb this trapped time.

On the third day I come in the early morning and the glow in this room is rare. I know it is for this light I have been waiting.

Many of my paints and all of my painting boards are from the old ones, and some brushes. When Granny discovered my obsession with these ancient paints, she had shown me the white clay from the bottom of the dam, and the black soot from the stove, and we had mixed it with egg yolk and a little melted lard. We fashioned brushes, too, from green twigs and the hair of pigs, and from my hair, and the cows' tails. All have been well used, as the painting boards have been well used. Since infancy I have made my pictures, though I smile now at some of the childish things, the worst of which I will cover today.

The table in this room is a good solid thing; I think it a pity that we can not have it in the kitchen, but to move it would require Lenny's strength, and should he step upon these fragile floors, there would be no more floors for me to walk on.

There is much to see in the old cabinet, and a thing I believe to be a power machine of the old ones. It has a cord, thicker yet similar to that of our suction tool. I do not know its use, but it has the writing letters upon a flat section to the front of it. Perhaps it is a printing machine, as the ones in the city that make the newsprint.

I make space in this room, but carefully. I move beds and their aged bedding, much of which falls apart in my hands, and some of which, when cleansed, will make cloths for Pa's cheeses. I draw down the thick webs, and brush at the glass of the window, and sneeze, sneeze, until the window shakes in its frame. Some glass is intact, other panes have been replaced by old timber.

How heavy the dust lies here. It is thick and in every corner. I think it will serve me better if I do not yet disturb this place more, for my sneezing will not stop. Outside the window the dogs bark at each sneeze and think it a fine game.

Many of my paints have solidified in the tubes, others remain quite soft, but even those that are near dust, when mixed with egg yolk and the city spread, soon move freely across my board.

For hours I stand in silence while my brush places the table and the cabinets just so. And the shape of the window, and the peak of the hill outside the window. Only then do I begin to mix a flesh tone.

Time goes away to that other place. It takes sound with it. A hush surrounds me, stills my mind and frees my hand as layer by layer I build, allowing the spirits of the room to guide my brushes. Slowly I move back the years as I seek the ones who died in this house.

Then suddenly one glint of sunlight, entering via a devious pathway, settles on the curved glass of the cabinet. It flits to my board and I trap it with the touch of a brush, catch it with one stroke of white. And my painting lives. It lives, and I enter into it.

I feel no thirst in this place, no hunger, as for hours I communicate with the perfect child of my brush. I allowed the sunlight into her hair, and dust her with the shadow of a rich curtain, for surely in the time before, those faded rags upon the floor were curtains, hung long at this window.

Then the sun and the day are gone, and the light in my room fades. But how my painting moves. This child's world is alive with movement, and it holds me here. Today this painting must be done.

I catch a chubby hand reaching out. ‘
Come and play
,' she urges, and I smile with love of her as I touch her fingernails with white. I have mixed much white clay and not used enough of it, so I make her a white half-dress and touch it with lace, as from the rotting lace curtain.

And it is gone from me and I gone from it. I am a void, a bucket emptied. I am a cloth, wrung out, squeezed dry, limp as the cobwebs that drape this room.

I step away, admire it. It looks so well. I will not use this board again, but perhaps find an old frame that might fit it. I love this room and want it for myself. Oh, not the neglect and dust of it; I will wipe the dust away tomorrow; I will wipe the floor and move the rotted fabric. This room will live again because it is a very fine, dry room. And it is safe from the grey men. They will not think to come here, not think to find me hiding here.

The following afternoon when I return to my painting, I find it brighter than I had thought it to be. The poor light of the previous evening has helped me to fill it with colour. And how it pleases me. My gaze rests on the child who stands beside the window with the sunlight glinting on her hair – hair that last night I thought to be the gold of Jonjan's. Today it glows with red fire.

I frown then, and for a moment chew at the paint stain on my finger. I have painted the wide-eyed infant from the newsprint, the infant they name Merith. But her smile, open, inviting, has become guarded. In her hand that yesterday held a ball, that yesterday reached out to me, inviting me to play, she now holds an apricot, and surely she has stolen it, for her mouth is wet with its juice.

My head explodes then with memory. I swing around, bumping the table, stumbling past it. I grasp the door, fling its aching hinges wide then, careless of the floor, I run down the decaying passage to my own room, and inside my room, slam my door behind me and sit on my bed.

My heartbeat is too wild, for I remember. I remember another child. And I remember the green of a garden and the flowers and the many males working in the garden. And I remember a male who held me, who picked for me an apricot.

‘Nate,' I whisper. ‘Nate, of the city garden.'

It was his song, not my mother's. Nate, a male. He sang that song to me.

Lord. God. Am I freeborn, or as the Merith child, of the laboratories? Did I have a mother, or is it Nate's hair that I remember, is it his hand that grew cold? I think I am a creation of that bastard city, born of a plasti-womb, fed by the disabled. I think I am from an ovum, stored long in a freezer . . . as . . . as the legs of Lenny's pig are stored in the freezer to grow hard as rock. I think I was given to Nate as reward, in recognition of his service to the Chosen, as Jonjan was given to his lying father, Jacob.

Who am I? Lord. What am I?

(Excerpt from the New World Bible)

Thus there came a time when the searcher flew far, for the Godsent fuel had brought improvement to their craft which now might be brought to earth with great control at sundown, then impelled again into the sky when the sun rose. And the searchers knew no fear of the skies. And the distance covered by their wings grew great.

 

But the searcher's life span was of short duration.

 

For there were those of them who flew too high. And there were those of them brought early to death of the flier's sickness. And there were those who were lost to mountain and to storm.

 

But there were those who gained great reward, for news of distant land and of the feral females who roamed there was much desired.

 

And thus it was discovered that on the great plain to the north, there sheltered a small band of ferals from the time before. And it was learned that amongst this band were many females, both infant and adult.

 

And it was learned that there were others who roamed to the south. And they hunted with spear and club. And it was learned that they had fire.

 

And much was made of these reports and great commotion came to the city. There was extensive planning and preparation, for the distance and terrain was such that a ground force could not go there to retrieve the feral females.

 

In time the copter flying machines were improved upon so they might carry within them abundant fuel. And a loading space was made in them.

 

And they were sent forth to follow the searchers, whose small craft could not carry these groups into civilisation.

 

And when the great machines were placed down upon the earth, both to the north of the city and to the south, it was found that the feral groups did not wish to be carried into civilisation.

 

And the males were slaughtered. But the females were bound and carried.

I do not look at the likeness of the domed building of the city garden in the newsprint now, for I know I have walked there. I find also I think too much, of Nate and also of the grey men. And I think they planted me here, as a pumpkin seed is planted, planted me before my memories grew strong, for they wished me to grow strong and safe from the city plagues until I was of an age to breed, and I wonder if there are others such as me. Granny once told me that the females did not live to an old age in the city breeding stations, and certainly, the February female made only her twenty-sixth year. I think I am a part of the new breeding program. Yes, I think this is so.

I speak to Lenny of the day I came, and I question him when he comes to my bed, but he has no answers for me and also does not wish to talk but to mate.

‘We didn't find your mother, didn't find no blood, no searcher craft, girl. If I told you once, I told you umpteen times. The old girl wanted you. Said you'd been sent to her to finish what she started. Didn't want us searching.'

‘What was my clothing when I came? Was it of the city?'

‘It weren't hides, girl. Fine stuff it was, and sandals on your little feet. Don't rightly know more. We seen you the next day after you come – heard you the next day. All you could yell was “Mummy”.'

Many days pass before I again make my feet enter that yesterday room. I look at my painting. Certainly I have painted the city child, and certainly it is well done. If it has made me remember the city and the taste of apricot on my tongue, this does not alter the pleasure I feel when I study that living child. For she lives, and with more vitality than is displayed in the newsprint.

I like this room. Will I allow the archives of my mind to chase me away from it? If I too was a child of the city, does it alter now who I am? I am what Granny made me and she made me of this land. So I begin my cleaning of the room.

Lord, there is much to discover here. There are unknown items and the known, the well known. I find many pencils, and some are long. I find books that I have never seen, books with pictures of laughing bears and childhood. Such sweet stories they contain, and on some of these books there are names.
Emma Morgan. Aaron Morgan.
Much of what I touch falls apart in my hands, but many of the books are still strong as the ones in Granny's downstairs library.

And in the rear of the cabinet, I come upon the childhood writings of Aaron Morgan for it has his name upon the paper. It is not as a book, but separate pages, which are slid into a heavy paper cover.

There are the February and March months which are of many complaints and talk of other boys, of Michael and Tommy and Mrs Martin. It is just a boy's thing I have found, there is no story to it, and much in it I do not understand, nor can I find the words in Granny's dictionary.

And then there is April.

It is strange, but these words still my reading. Perhaps this is where Granny's obsession was born.

Be a rabbit, girl. Find a hole and crawl into it.

Had the child hands of Moni touched these pages? Had she sat, as I sit, on this fine chair which has support for my back? Had she spent much time in this room, reading the words of Aaron? Surely she had, for this room – and all the rooms – were strong in the time of her childhood. Is the answer to her rabbit riddle in the cellar? A disguised trapdoor, as in a book she read to me. Is it behind the trapdoor that leans against the wall?

She had told me once of the trapdoor spider. We had found his hole near the barn.

‘See how well he hides, girl. He crawls in and pulls down his lid. We know what to look for, so we can find him, but his enemies can not.'

I must go to the cellar, take a battery light and search. Tomorrow I will search, for I do not wish to leave Aaron's writing now.

The journal speaks much of
television
and
Toyota
, and much of food. I think Aaron is very young. He writes of killing a sheep for meat, as Lenny kills the young bullocks for meat. He writes more of the beasts' disease and also of Mr Gillmartin's horses.

I do not know the horse, though I have seen likenesses in the books and read much of the riding of them. Fine tall beasts they were. How strange it would be to live in a world with such giants. It is surely a different world Aaron writes of, such strange times. I know money – from the books, but how did they make pots from it? Granny once said to me, ‘The pen is mightier than the sword. Why, girl?' A sword, I knew even then, was a long sharp knife-like tool the old king used to cut off the queen's head. I remember looking long at Granny's precious stub of pencil and not believing her words, for at that time even her hitting stick was much stronger. She was attempting to teach me the task of pencil writing, which I did not wish to learn, for I preferred making colourful letters with my paints on bark and brick. Certainly the machine that made Aaron's journal was mightier than that pencil. Its small print has remained clear. My child writing on the unused pages of Granny's books has faded clean away. I believed her riddles were spoken to make sport of me and in later years I did not try to decipher them, but today I take one of Aaron's long pencils in my hand and stare at it. It is not a mighty tool at all. It is small and of wood. I could break it as easily as a twig.

But the pencil is here, and the sword is not.

The sword was of metal, and unbreakable. The sword killed many.

‘Ah. But the pencil recorded the killings, as with the king who cut off heads. We can not now see the sword, but we know of it because of the pencil. Yes. Yes. I have deciphered your riddle, Granny. Are you listening?'

She makes no reply, but I am pleased with myself as I sort through the many pencils. Some are of wood with a centre of colour buried within, as with Granny's small pencil stub. The wooden pencils write cleanly, but the plasti and metal kind make no mark at all. How well it would have been to have learned to write with these pencils; I did not hold Granny's precious stub at all well in my small hand.

What age was I then? Time in childhood is a meaningless thing. There was the heat of summer and the chill of winter and the times between.

Granny understood time. She had a square of the old timber and each year of my childhood she drew a calendar of months and days on it, and she knew the names of each day. While she lived, her old grandfather clock had counted the hours of her days.

‘My time on earth is a gift. Do not measure a gift,' she said to me, and said it often, and I think now, so what was her obsession with that clock, so what was her obsession with her calendars, and her days of the week, if not a measuring of time? Much of what she said meant little to me back then. She spoke in picture and poem and riddle.

‘Jem had gone feral by the time I got back,' she had said one day. ‘He'd lived alone here after his father died for nigh on thirty years, lived with his animals. I stole his pumpkins first, then started creeping down at night, stripping the milk from his cows.'

When she had spoken of Jem, I had not known of whom she had spoken. Now I know that he is old Pa, near newborn at the time Granny was taken. And the one she named Jem's bastard, her own son, Lenny.