The fights were about where Zeb was when he wasn't with Lucerne. "Working," was all he'd say. Or "Don't push me, babe." Or "You don't need to know. It's for your own good."
"You've got someone else!" Lucerne would say. "I can smell bitch all over you!"
"Wow," Amanda would whisper. "Your mom's got a foul mouth!" and I didn't know whether to be proud or ashamed.
"No, no," Zeb would say in a tired voice. "Why would I want anyone but you, babe?"
"You're lying!"
"Oh, Christ in a helicopter! Get off my fucking case!"
Zeb came out of the shower cubicle, dripping on the floor. I could see the scar where he'd got slashed that time, back when I was ten: it gave me a shivery feeling. "How're my little pleebrats today?" he said, grinning like a troll.
Amanda smiled sweetly. "Big pleebrats," she said.
For breakfast we had mashed-up fried black beans and soft-boiled pigeon's eggs. "Nice breakfast, babe," Zeb said to Lucerne. I had to admit that it was actually quite nice, even though Lucerne had cooked it.
Lucerne gave him that syrupy smile of hers. "I wanted to be sure you all get a good meal," she said. "Considering what you'll be eating the rest of the week. Old roots and mice, I suppose."
"Barbecued rabbit," said Zeb. "I could eat ten of those suckers, with a side of mice and some deep-fried slugs for dessert." He leered over at Amanda and me: he was trying to gross us out.
"Sounds real good," said Amanda.
"You're such a monster," said Lucerne, giving him her cookie eyes.
"Too bad I can't get a beer with it," said Zeb. "Join us, babe, we need some decoration."
"Oh, I think I'll sit this one out," said Lucerne.
"You're not coming with us?" I said. Usually during Saint Euell's Week, Lucerne would trail along on the woodland walks, picking the odd weed and complaining about the bugs and keeping an eye on Zeb. I didn't really want her to come this time, but also I wanted things to stay normal, because I had a feeling that everything was about to be rearranged again, as it was when I'd been yanked out of the HelthWyzer Compound. It was just a feeling, but I didn't like it. I was used to the Gardeners, it was where I belonged now.
"I don't think I can," she said. "I've got a migraine headache." She'd had a migraine headache yesterday too. "I'll just go back to bed."
"I'll ask Toby to drop around," said Zeb. "Or Pilar. Make that mean ol' pain go away."
"Would you?" A suffering smile.
"No problem," said Zeb. Lucerne hadn't eaten her pigeon's egg, so he ate it for her. It was only about the size of a plum anyway.
The beans were from the Garden, but the pigeon's eggs were from our own rooftop. We didn't have any plants up there, because Adam One said it was not a suitable surface, but we had pigeons. Zeb lured them with crumbs, moving softly so they felt safe. Then they'd lay eggs, and then he'd rob their nests. Pigeons weren't an endangered species, he said, so it was okay.
Adam One said that eggs were potential Creatures, but they weren't Creatures yet: a nut was not a Tree. Did eggs have souls? No, but they had potential souls. So not a lot of Gardeners did egg-eating, but they didn't condemn it either. You didn't apologize to an egg before joining its protein to yours, though you had to apologize to the mother pigeon, and thank her for her gift. I doubt Zeb bothered with any apologizing. Most likely he ate some of the mother pigeons too, on the sly.
Amanda had one pigeon's egg. So did I. Zeb had three, plus Lucerne's. He needed more than us because he was bigger, Lucerne said: if we ate like him we'd get fat.
"See you later, warrior maidens. Don't kill anyone," said Zeb as we went out the door. He'd heard about Amanda's knee-in-the-groin and eye-gouging moves, and her piece of glass with the duct tape; he made jokes about them.
26
We had to pick up Bernice at the Buenavista before school. Amanda and I had wanted to quit, but we knew we'd get in trouble from Adam One if we did, for being un-Gardener. Bernice still didn't like Amanda, but she didn't exactly hate her either. She was wary of her the way you might be of some animals, like a bird with a very sharp beak. Bernice was mean, but Amanda was tough, which is different.
Nothing could change the way things were, which was that Bernice and I had once been best friends and we weren't any longer. That made me uneasy when I was around her: I felt guilty in some way. Bernice was aware of this, and she'd try to find ways to twist my guilt around and turn it against Amanda.
Still, things were friendly on the outside. The three of us walked to and from school together, or did chores or Young Bioneer collecting. That sort of thing. Bernice never came over to the Cheese Factory, though, and we never hung out with her after school.
On the way to Bernice's that morning, Amanda said, "I've found out something."
"What?" I said.
"I know where Burt goes between five and six, two nights a week." "Burt the Knob? Who cares!" I said. We both felt contempt for him because he was such a pathetic armpit-groper.
"No. Listen. He goes to the same place Nuala goes," said Amanda.
"You're joking! Where?" Nuala flirted, but she flirted with all men. It was only her way, like giving you the stone-eye was Toby's way.
"They go into the Vinegar Room when no one's supposed to be there."
"Oh no!" I said. "Really?" I knew this was about sex -- most of our jokey conversations were. The Gardeners called sex "the generative act" and said it was not a fit subject for ridicule, but Amanda ridiculed it anyway. You could snigger at it or trade it or both, but you couldn't respect it.
"No wonder her bum's so wobbly," said Amanda. "It's getting worn out. It's like Veena's old sofa -- all saggy."
"I don't believe you!" I said. "She couldn't be doing it! Not with Burt!"
"Cross my heart and spit," said Amanda. She spat: she was a good spitter. "Why else would she go there with him?"
We Gardeners kids often made up rude stories about the sex lives of the Adams and Eves. It took away some of their power to imagine them naked, either with each other or with stray dogs, or even with the green-skinned girls in the pictures outside Scales and Tails. Still, Nuala moaning and flailing around with Burt the Knob was hard to picture. "Well, anyway," I said, "we can't tell Bernice!" Then we laughed some more.
At the Buenavista we nodded at the dowdy Gardener lady behind the lobby desk, who was doing string knotwork and didn't look up. Then we climbed the stairs, avoiding the used needles and condoms. The Buenavista Condom was Amanda's name for this building, so I called it that now too. The mushroomy, spicy Buenavista smell was stronger today.
"Someone's got a gro-op," said Amanda. "It reeks of skunkweed." She was an authority: she'd lived out there in the Exfernal World, she'd even done some drugs. Not much though, she said, because you lost your edge with drugs, you should only buy them from people you trusted because anything could have anything in it, and she didn't trust anybody much. I'd nag her to let me try some, but she wouldn't. "You're a baby," she'd say. Or else she'd say she had no good contacts since she'd been with the Gardeners.
"There can't be a gro-op in here," I said. "This building's Gardener. It's only the pleebmobs who have gro-ops. It's just -- kids smoke it in here, at night. Pleeb kids."
"Yeah, I know," said Amanda, "but this isn't smoke. It's more of a gro-op smell."
As we reached the fourth-floor level, we heard voices -- men's voices, two of them, on the other side of the landing door. They didn't sound friendly.
"That's all I got," said one voice. "I'll have the rest tomorrow."
"Asshole!" said the other. "Don't jerk me around!" There was a thud, as if something had hit the wall; then another thud, and a wordless yell, of pain or anger.
Amanda poked me. "Climb," she said. "Fast!"
We ran up the rest of the stairs as quietly as we could. "That was serious," said Amanda when we'd reached the sixth floor.
"How do you mean?"
"Some trade going bad," said Amanda. "We never heard this. Now, act norma
l." She looked scared, which scared me too because Amanda didn't scare easily.
We knocked at Bernice's door. "Knock, knock," said Amanda.
"Who's there?" said Bernice's voice. She must've been waiting for us right inside the door, as if she was afraid we might not come. I found this sad.
"Gang," said Amanda.
"Gang who?"
"Gangrene," said Amanda. She'd adopted Shackie's password, and the three of us used it now.
When Bernice opened the door I had a glimpse of Veena the Vegetable. She was sitting on her brown plush sofa as usual, but she was looking at us as if she actually saw us. "Don't be late," she said to Bernice.
"She spoke to you!" I said to Bernice once she was out in the hall with the door closed behind her. I was trying to be friendly, but Bernice froze me out. "Yeah, so?" she said. "She's not a moron."
"Didn't say she was," I said coldly.
Bernice gave me a short glare. Even her glaring power wasn't what it used to be, ever since Amanda had come.
27
When we got to the vacant lot behind Scales for our Outdoor Classroom Predator-Prey demonstration, Zeb was sitting on a folding canvas camp-stool. There was a cloth bag at his feet with something in it. I tried not to look at the bag. "We're all here? Good," said Zeb. "Now. Predator-Prey Relations. Hunting and stalking. What are the rules?"
"Seeing without being seen," we chanted. "Hearing without being heard. Smelling without being smelled. Eating without being eaten!"
"You forgot one," said Zeb.
"Injuring without being injured," said one of the oldest boys.
"Correct! A predator can't afford a serious injury. If it can't hunt, it'll starve. It must attack suddenly and kill quickly. It must choose the prey that's at a disadvantage -- too young, too old, too crippled to run away or fight back. How do we avoid being prey?"
"By not looking like prey," we chanted.
"By not looking like the prey of that predator," said Zeb. "A surf-boarder looks like a seal, to a shark, from underneath. Try to imagine what you look like from the predator's point of view."
"Don't show fear," said Amanda.
"Right. Don't show fear. Don't act sick. Make yourself look as big as possible. That will deter the larger hunting animals. But we ourselves are among the larger hunting animals, aren't we? Why would we hunt?" said Zeb.
"To eat," said Amanda. "There's no other good reason."
Zeb grinned at her as if this was a secret only the two of them knew. "Exactly," he said.
Zeb lifted up the cloth bag, untied it, and reached his hand in. He left his hand inside for what seemed a very long time. Then he took out a dead green rabbit. "Got it in Heritage Park. Rabbit trap," he said. "Noose. You can use them for the rakunks too. Now we're going to skin and gut the prey."
It still makes me feel sick to think about that part. The older boys helped him -- they didn't flinch, though even Shackie and Croze seemed a bit strained. They always did whatever Zeb said. They looked up to him. It wasn't only because of his size. It was because he had lore, and it was lore they respected.
"What if the rabbit isn't, like, dead?" Croze asked. "In the snare."
"Then you kill it," said Zeb. "Smash it on the head with a rock. Or take it by the hind legs and bash it on the ground." You wouldn't kill a sheep like that, he added, because sheep had hard skulls: you'd slit its throat. Everything had its own most efficient way of being killed.
Zeb went on with the skinning. Amanda helped with the part where the furry green skin turned inside out like a glove. I tried not to look at the veins. They were too blue. And the glistening sinews.
Zeb made the chunks of meat really small so everyone could try, and also because he didn't want to push us too far by making us eat big pieces. Then we grilled the chunks over a fire made with some old boards.
"This is what you'll have to do if worst comes to worst," said Zeb. He handed me a chunk. I put it into my mouth. I found I could chew and swallow if I kept repeating in my head, "It's really bean paste, it's really bean paste ..." I counted to a hundred, and then it was down.
But I had the taste of rabbit in my mouth. It felt like I'd eaten a nosebleed.
That afternoon we had the Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange. It was held in a parkette on the northern edge of Heritage Park, across from the SolarSpace boutiques. It had a sand pit and a swing-and-slide set for small kids. There was a cobb house too, made of clay and sand and straw. It had six rooms and curved doorways and windows, but no doors or glass. Adam One said it was ancient greenies who'd built it, at least thirty years ago. The pleebrats had sprayed their tags and messages all over the walls: I LV pssys (BBQd). Sk my dk, it's organic! UR ded FKn GreeNeez!
The Tree of Life wasn't just for Gardeners. Everyone in the Natmart Net sold there -- the Fernside Collective, the Big Box Backyarders, the Golfgreens Greenies. We looked down on these others because their clothes were nicer than ours. Adam One said their trading products were morally contaminated, though they didn't radiate synthetic slave-labour evil the way the flashy items in the mallway did. The Fernsiders sold their overglazed ceramics, plus jewellery they'd made from paper clips; the Big Box Backyarders did knitted animals; the Golfgreeners made artsy handbags out of rolled paper from vintage magazines, and grew cabbages around the edges of their golf course. Big deal, said Bernice, they still spray the grass there so a few cabbages won't save their souls. Bernice was getting more and more pious. Maybe it was her substitute for not having any real friends.
A lot of upmarket trendies came to the Tree of Life. Affluents from the SolarSpace gated communities, Fernside showoffs, even people from the Compounds, coming out for a safe pleebland adventure. They claimed to prefer our Gardener vegetables to the supermarkette kinds and even to the so-called farmers' markets, where -- said Amanda -- guys in farmer drag bought stuff from warehouses and tossed it into ethnic baskets and marked up the prices, so even if it said Organic you couldn't trust it. But the Gardener produce was the real thing. It stank of authenticity: the Gardeners might be fanatical and amusingly bizarre, but at least they were ethical. That's how they talked while I was wrapping up their purchases in recycled plastic.
The worst thing about helping at the Tree of Life was that we had to wear our Young Bioneer neck scarves. This was humiliating, as the trendies would often bring their kids. These kids wore baseball caps with words on them and stared at us and our neck scarves and drab clothing as if we were freaks, whispering among themselves and laughing. I'd try to ignore them. Bernice would stomp up to them and say, "What're you staring at?" Amanda's mode was smoother. She'd smile at them, then take out her piece of glass with the duct tape and cut a line on her arm and lick the blood. Then she'd run her bloody tongue around her lips, and hold out her arm, and they'd back off fast. Amanda said if you want people to leave you alone you should act crazy.
The three of us were told to help at the mushroom booth. Usually it was Pilar and Toby there, but Pilar wasn't well so it was only Toby. She was strict: you had to stand up straight and be extra polite.
I checked out the affluents as they walked past. Some had pastel jeans and sandals, but others were overloaded with expensive skin -- alligator slingbacks, leopard minis, oryx-hide handbags. They'd give you this defensive look: I didn't kill it, why let it go to waste? I wondered what it would be like to wear those things -- to feel another creature's skin right next to your own.
Some of them had the new Mo'Hairs -- silver, pink, blue. Amanda said there were Mo'Hair shops in the Sewage Lagoon that lured girls in, and once you were in the scalp-transplant room they'd knock you out, and when you woke up you'd not only have different hair but different fingerprints, and then you'd be locked in a membrane house and forced into bristle work, and even if you escaped you'd never be able to prove who you were because they'd stolen your identity. This sounded really extreme. And Amanda did tell lies. But we'd made a pact never to lie to each other. So I thought maybe it was true.
After
an hour selling mushrooms with Toby we were told to go over to Nuala's booth to help with the vinegar. By this time we were feeling bored and silly, and every time Nuala bent over to get more vinegar from the box under the counter, Amanda and I made wiggly motions with our bums and sniggered under our breaths. Bernice was getting redder and redder because we weren't letting her in. I knew this was mean, but I couldn't somehow stop myself.
Then Amanda had to go to the violet porta-biolet, and Nuala said she needed a word with Burt, who was selling leaf-wrapped soap at the next booth. As soon as Nuala's back was turned, Bernice grabbed my arm and twisted it two ways at once. "Tell me!" she hissed.
"Let go!" I said. "Tell you what?"
"You know what! What's so funny with you and Amanda?"
"Nothing!" I said.
She twisted harder. "Okay," I said, "but you won't like it." Then I told her about Nuala and Burt and what they'd been doing in the Vinegar Room. I must have been longing to tell her anyway, because it all came out in a rush.
"That is a stinking lie!" she said.
"What's a stinking lie?" said Amanda, back from the porta-biolet.
"My father is not humping the Wet Witch!" hissed Bernice.
"I couldn't help it," I said. "She twisted my arm." Bernice's eyes were all red and watery, and if Amanda hadn't been there she would've hit me.
"Ren gets carried away," Amanda said. "The fact is, we don't know for sure. We just suspect that your father is humping the Wet Witch. Maybe he isn't. But you could understand him doing it, with your mother in a Fallow state so much. He must get very horny -- that's why he's always groping little girls' armpits." She said all of this in a virtuous, Eve sort of voice. It was cruel.
"He's not," said Bernice. "He doesn't!" She was close to tears.
"If he is," said Amanda in her calm voice, "it's something you should be aware of. I mean, if I had a father, I wouldn't want him humping someone's generative organ, other than my mother's. It's a filthy habit -- so unsanitary. You'd have to worry about his germy hands touching you. Though I'm sure he doesn't -- "