Black Juice (15 page)

‘T
HEN YOU COVER THE SEEDS
with the germinating medium, and Bob’s your uncle.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘And that’s it,’ said Statner’s friend—from inside a blizzard, it sounded like. ‘Then you wait. And if nothing comes up in two weeks, you got dudded on the seeds. Which happens a lot, so don’t be put off.’

‘Well, they weren’t exactly cheap …’ And I wasn’t exactly in a position to buy fresh ones whenever I felt like it.

There was a little tantrum of static. ‘… worry, after a while you develop a feeling for viable ones. And their purveyors.’

‘And then—if they
are
viable—it’s just a matter of keeping the water up to them?’

‘And the mixture, in the doses I told you. Listen, I’ve got to head off. Got to meet my mole from the Commonwealth Nutri-domes. Say hi to Statner for me, okay? And thank him. Always good to find a new recruit.’

‘I’ll do that. Thanks for your help.’

The furry rushing sound of the open line collapsed into a clean dead beeping. I put down the phone and picked up the scissors. I snipped open the sachet. The seeds inside were like dried peas, lifeless and unpromising. Then I sliced through the WundaVerm’s thick plastic. The stuff looked like white gravel with sequins stirred through. I wished I had music to steady my hand through this. But my sound system had gone bung a week ago, and it’d be another six weeks now until I could afford to fix it. I washed my hands with AntiBacto and got started.

‘I
DON’T LIKE THE IDEA AT ALL
,’ said Nerida the Naturopath. ‘Especially after that flu.’

‘I know, but it’s not as if I’ve got a choice. She’s the only grandmother I knew properly. I’m her only grandchild.’

Nerida gave a defeated sigh. Sometimes I hated to think what a disappointing place the world must be to this woman. ‘Well, you know what I’m here for: the whole organism. I can
see that if you don’t do this, you’ll selfflagellate until you’re sick. So just go. Go, and we’ll do some serious stripping out of toxins when you get back. You’ve got your injections organised?’

‘I go there straight after this.’

She made a releasing movement with her hands. ‘Just be careful, is all I ask. Don’t lose sight of the precautions in any moment of emotion. Your car’s sealed okay?’

‘It’s pretty good.’

She glowered at me. ‘Daphne, I
know
the kinds of vehicles you students drive.’

‘This one is all right in the seals department. And it’s just been serviced. I spent
three hundred
on the Old Girl.’ Ah, the pain.

She waved me away. ‘Go. Do what you have to do.’

T
HE SNIPPET BEHIND THE DOCTOR’S COUNTER
was very full of herself this morning. ‘I’m sorry. Compassionate Allowance doesn’t cover excursions for
grandparents’
funerals.’

I’d dealt with her before, though. ‘I spoke to Inge McCormack at the Department. I have a case number. She said it would be all right.’ I held out the number.

She didn’t take it. ‘The rule’s very clear on this,’ she scolded. ‘If we start making exceptions—’

I reached over and stuck the note to her phone-base. ‘You talk to Ms McCormack about exceptions. I’ve already had this argument.’ I sat down and started leafing through the latest
Celebrity Plus
. She made the call; she made a fuss, went silent,
tut-tutted, caved in. She banged around with her keyboard and files, sighing a lot. I paged through Anorexia Chic and Parched-Blueberry Crumble, listening to the snippet and feeling pleased with myself.

It wasn’t so great walking out of there, though; I felt as if they’d sewn a golf ball into my bum-cheek. I’d have to sit on it all the way to Greville.

Your suspension needs looking at
, the bloke at Artisan Autos had said.

How much’s worth of looking?
I’d asked straight away. He told me and I nearly swooned.
Will it get me to Greville and back as it is?

He sniffed.
Depends. If you’re careful. Corrugations should be all right, but you don’t want to hit any big potholes at speed
.

That’s okay. I can be careful
, I said, breathing again.

S
O HERE
I
WAS
, driving out onto the pre-dawn Treeless Plain. The road ahead seemed to be steaming in the headlights’ beams, the way the dust blew around on it. Flurries of the stuff hissed into the windscreen. It’d be
hiss
and
fwump
for a few hundred kilometres.

The seed tray was under the passenger seat, with my dad’s olden-days textbooks fore and aft holding it steady. I didn’t want to miss anything. And I didn’t know anyone who’d mind them in the right spirit. And they were extra incentive to drive gently.

I clicked Overdrive on and puffed out relief. I had a functional car, safe seed tray, bloodstream swimming with antibodies. All I had to do now was stay awake and keep the Old Girl pointed in the right direction.

‘W
HAT’S HE BROUGHT US TONIGHT
?’ said Grandma, pulling back from stirring the fire. ‘Another whirlygig?’

Blacktaw trotted to her, wearing his mad outdoor look. The creature in his mouth rowed a white leg in the air.

‘Set it down, Taw-taw,’ said Grandma. ‘Set it free, now.’ Blacktaw sat and looked doubtful. ‘No pats until you do, I tell you!’ I loved her haughty look.

Blacktaw lowered his head abjectly.

‘That’s right—put it down, Taw,’ I said, trying to sound as sure as Grandma. The cat paused and checked with Grandma again.

‘Come along, puss. Show me your night’s work.’

Finally, he bobbed forward, put it down and sat back.

Every night Taw brought in something different. Mostly they were only broken inside, with their outer layers still bright and their remaining movements natural. But sometimes he lost his head and ate half, and brought us the rest, the light gone out of their eyes and the mechs and bio-springs trailing. This one was possumish and shrewish—a jumper, but with its jumping mechanism cracked. It had red button-eyes and miniature chuffer-train breathing.

‘I think he’s got a broken back, Taw,’ said Grandma.

I thought Taw looked apologetic, but maybe he was just waiting for Grandma’s word to start eating.

I reached down and patted some of the cold night air out of his fur. He bore with me, looking at Grandma.

‘Do you know what I think?’ She took her thread-knife from the basket beside her, bent down and made a slit in the little animal’s lower abdomen. ‘See? I thought so.’ With the knife-tip she pressed on a swollen pink sac inside, and a clean, wet, white egg appeared, no bigger than the end segment of my thumb. The animal moved its forepaws anxiously, voided its bowels of two tiny silver cog-wheels, and died.

‘What is it, then?’ Grandma looked at me with mock puzzlement—this I also loved. ‘Is it a mouse? Or is it a bird, laying eggs? This place, it’s full of mysteries. This pussycat brings us a new mystery every night. Don’t you, puss?’

‘I think he’s hungry, Grandma.’

‘
Is
he?
Are
you hungry, big black Taw-taw? There’s a lot of you to feed, certainly.’

‘You’re teasing him! You always tell me not to do that!’

‘I know. I am a cruel old woman. Go, Taw-taw. Take it away and eat it. It’s good food.’ And she nudged it with her toe.

Blacktaw picked the animal up by the head, laid it closer to the fire, and started to crack and crunch.

P
LACE OF
M
ANY
P
OSSUMS
, the Aborigines used to call Greville. It was like a lot of towns I’d passed through already
this morning, a dying collection of buildings like eye sockets and mumbling jaws, grey under a grey sky. Its public buildings had been repurposed to death, through phases of gentrification, hippie squat and serious poorhouse. The Old Girl skittered on the built-up grit at every intersection.

I saw the glint of Mum’s flatbed cab down near the cemetery. She and my auntie had started out from the Wagga Mecho-dome last night. They liked to think they were tough old birds; they didn’t mind getting out to pee in the poisonous dark, or switching off all but the ventilator and kipping in the vehicle. ‘We’ve got a lot of old immunities,’ Auntie Pruitt was always saying, dressing up a boast as an apology for my newage feebleness. They’d be getting precious about relatives’ headstones, and the Fleeting Nature of Life. Going down there to join them would only be painful for all three of us.

The church was intact, but nothing was happening there yet. I parked and switched off most of the Old Girl. Then I clambered into the back seat, unclipped the torch, shifted
Excision of Facial Nerves
out of the way and eased out the seed tray.

Nothing yet. Lifeless as a Japanese gravel garden.
Then you wait
, Statner’s friend had said, and like an idiot I hadn’t asked how long. It was three days now. I had no idea—should I be ditching the mixture already, or not bothering to look for another week and a half? I wished I were an olden-days person who just knew these things, who had this knowledge all through them that they’d just
osmosed
from their elders.
Who knew how the world worked—big intricate animal that it was—instead of paying her heart out for instruction on a small electronic part of it, all the while praying that the economy would hold still long enough for the risk to be worth it.

A car was approaching. I clicked off the torch and slid the seeds and books away. The square afterimage of the torchlit tray hovered in my eyes.

It wasn’t Mum and Auntie. It was the priest in his Lambda, a glossy black bit of ecclesiastical luxury. He stayed in the car, like me, except he probably had a fully functional sound system pumping out Gregorian chant. Or motivational talk, because he looked
young
, I noticed with disgust. One of those new wave gay married priests, probably. Not what Grandma would have wanted at all.

The flatbed scooted past me and around into the carpark on the far side of the church. I got out of the Old Girl, whanged her closed and strode around the church hands in pockets, meshing my eyelashes against the blowing grit.

Mum was just coming around the flatbed, and Pruitt was flinging herself out of the passenger seat. They both gave me the same hostile look, from deep within sisterdom. They were eerily the same: the big glasses, the mannish faces, the long harsh-blonded hair snaking out in the wind, the blue-and-white quilted flannel shirts. Both of them were wept dry and feeling old; part of the hostility was the hatred of old for young, however modern and allergic she might be.

It was very cold. The sky was a flat, bright, migraineinducing grey. My eyes were already stinging.

‘C
OME NOW, WAKE
, child. It’s a good morning for it.’

Blearily I peered over the quilt edge.

‘Up you get,’ said Grandma. ‘We’re going down to the creek, remember?’

‘Oh, that’s right!’ I pushed back the heavy cotton sheet, the soft quilt.

I dressed quickly and warmly, and came out to her pulling on my mittens. Even inside, our breaths were misting on the air.

‘Good girl,’ said Grandma, and we went out of the cottage.

The forest was unfamiliar in the fog. I was wrapped in captured bed-warmth, but the cold nipped my nose and cheeks. The path wound down the hill through the trees. Bark wept off the tree trunks, staining the creamy plush under-skin rust and black. The pointy leaves dangled out of the mist. The cold air smelt of the medicine in them. Grandma had made this path; her flower beds, edged with scallop shells, showed vague in the mist ahead, brightened to pink and mauve and gold for the moments we passed them, and faded back to grey behind us.

We came to the place. It was away from the path, through some dripping scrub. First Grandma’s cardigan-back got diamantéed, and then black-polka-dotted, with water shaken from the leaves.

‘I’m going to make a seat down here,’ she whispered as we settled on the leaf-matted ground. ‘It’ll be concrete, but made to look like wood. Like a wooden plank propped on two tree trunks. I’ve seen it done; it’s very effective. Now shhh.’ She cocked her head towards where I should look, a little clearing walled with dew-coated white stalks.

We quieted down to the silence of everything else. A few bird-calls echoed as if in a vast empty room. The cold air smelled of water and bruised leaves. Beside us the creek was a cable of glass under a twisted roll of mist; it looked as if the water were only trembling slightly, not actually flowing.

Grandma nudged me.

There was movement in the clearing, a fine net of rustling, but no shape yet. When had he flown in? Or walked? Or begun to shake together into being?

Then I saw where the net began and ended, and the bird behind it, blurred and shadowed. He was a modest thing, neat and busy in the grey morning. He would have been nothing without the tail—no crown, no colour, nothing special.

He walked about arranging. He tidied leaves off his patch. He pulled grasses into line. He fussed and fussed with one of Grandma’s garden shells, moving it about, getting it in the right place, changing his mind.

Even with the tail, colour was not the thing. Two redbrown feathers held the design together at either edge, and the space between them was all muted sparkle, silver and grey, with a froth of red-brown and cream at the very end. He carried
this fabulous artefact around with him while he did his housekeeping, and yet it was clean and bright, with no stray leaf or bush-bit caught up in it, with no part of it draggled or damp.

He went all around his patch, calling, waiting, moving the shell irritably, calling again.
Pi-ipe, pip
, he called. Rustle, scrape.
Py-eep, pip. Py-eep, pip
.

When the girl-bird came, she was nothing. She had no tail, and was a dull green. She said nothing, either, but he knew she was there, propped sideways with her claws in a tree, pretending not to see him.

And then, didn’t he dance! He tipped his tail up and over his head, drawing and shivering it along the ground, watching her from within. The sound was feathers, but also metal—very light rich rustly metal. And all the while he made such noises! Bird noises and dog noises, train noises, noises of Grandma and me, calling in the cottage yard. Everything that went on, in and around here, this bird had heard and recorded, and now he was telling her the whole story.